Nothing proved the depth of Frederick Blair’s commitment to Oak Island better than the years he spent negotiating his way through the thicket of government bureaucracy that was threatening to strangle the treasure hunt during the first part of the twentieth century. The root of the problem Blair had to wrangle with went all the way back to the year 1276, when England, under the reign of Edward I, had enacted the Law of the Treasure Trove. This statute required that “treasures found hidden or concealed without any known owner belong to the King.” The royal prerogative had passed to the provincial governments in Canada, and J. W. Longley, the attorney general of Nova Scotia, declared in September 1895 that “any treasure discovered at Oak Island will, as far as I am concerned, belong to Her Majesty as represented by the Government of Nova Scotia.”
Blair moved to protect himself by applying for a lease under Nova Scotia’s recently passed Mines Act that would permit him to search for and claim gold and silver on Oak Island within an area that was 450 feet by 500 feet and contained not only the Money Pit but all the other shafts that had been sunk on the east end of the island. After a decade-long campaign that involved hiring various agents to buffer him from the bureaucrats in Halifax, Blair acquired the Mines Act lease in late 1905. This document had a life span of forty years, but it only protected the precious metals Blair might find on Oak Island. Convinced at this point that the island’s treasure might be something quite different than chests of coins, Blair (through his agent) negotiated a deal with the province that gave him the exclusive right to search for an undefined “trove” on Oak Island, as long as he agreed to pay the government 2 percent of the value of whatever he found. That agreement was not signed until 1909. To secure his position more firmly, Blair also signed an agreement with Henry Sellers that allowed him to conduct operations that included “digging or excavating” on the east end of Oak Island for a fee of $100 a year.
Finally in a position to proceed with the treasure hunt, what Blair needed now was a partner with the means to mount another onslaught against the Money Pit. Within just a few weeks, he teamed up with a man who appeared to fit the bill in every way.
Captain Henry Bowdoin certainly did not lack a flair for self-promotion. The news that the famous adventurer had joined the Oak Island treasure hunt was announced in the March 18, 1909, edition of the New York Herald. Bowdoin, at that time living at 44 Broadway in Manhattan, was described in the preface to his Herald interview as “a mining, mechanical and marine engineer, a Master and Pilot [with] a license as a submarine driver. He has dredged harbours and built bridges for the government and for corporations and says that modern machinery and engineering science will solve in a jiffy the difficulties Captain Kidd made to guard his treasure.”
He had reached an agreement with Frederick Blair “for the apportionment of [the] ten million dollars” he estimated the Oak Island treasure would be worth, Bowdoin told the Herald, “and has ordered such machinery as he will need.” He would start with a crew of six handpicked men who would leave for Nova Scotia by rail on May 1, Bowdoin said, after sending his machinery ahead by schooner. The cost of the operation he estimated at $15,000.
“Any competent engineer could clear up that affair in no time,” Bowdoin told the newspaper. “And I don’t want more than two weeks for the work, after I get my machinery and crew on the ground. It will be a vacation, and about all I stand to lose is the wages of the men and my own time, for the machinery will be valuable in my business afterward.”
In another, shorter interview published the same day in the New York Times, Bowdoin admitted that “he had not yet decided how he will get at the treasure,” but he did not think he would have much difficulty in choosing the right approach after an up-close look at the situation. “He says he may sink a caisson down around the place where the treasure is supposed to be,” the Times reported, “or may build another jetty [cofferdam?]. He may even send a diver down in one of the holes, equipped with a pick-axe. He has never been on Oak Island, so he will have to decide on that when he gets there.” A bold fellow indeed.
The biggest news in the Times piece, though, was Captain Bowdoin’s claim that what was buried on Oak Island was not the Captain Kidd treasure at all, but rather the crown jewels of France.
The crown jewels were almost certainly the most fantastic collection ever kept by a single family (the Bourbons) in human history. The regalia—the assortment of ceremonial accoutrements that were used during the coronations of French kings—was alone of unimaginable value. Along with the sword, scepter, chalice, and robe brooch, the regalia included as many as eight crowns, among them the one worn by Louis XV, in which the 141-carat Regent diamond (valued today at more than $100 million) was set in the lower part of the fleur-de-lis at the front of the crown, with the magnificent 56-carat Sancy diamond seated in the upper petal above, surrounded by eight of the famous Mazarin diamonds set between double rows of pearls and smaller diamonds. During the nineteenth century, newspapers in Europe and the Americas had carried many articles that catalogued not only the regalia, but also the many other pieces of the crown jewels, including the 136-carat Ruspoli sapphire, the 28-carat Topaze, and the 17-carat Great Emerald of Louis XIV.
The disappearance of the crown jewels during the French Revolution had spawned dozens of stories and legends that captivated and diverted the reading public. One commonly repeated version (which has appeared in any number of books about Oak Island, including R. V. Harris’s otherwise reliable The Oak Island Mystery) was that in June 1791 Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had fled the revolutionary mob in Paris, headed for Austria with crown jewels loaded in their luggage. Yet when the two were captured in Varennes, this account goes, the jewels were no longer with them and apparently had been spirited out of the country by an accomplice.
In fact, the crown jewels were being kept the whole time at the Royal Storehouse, where they remained until September 11, 1792, when they were stolen during looting at the height of the revolution’s chaos. Nearly the entire collection was recovered a short time later when the thieves were captured, and eventually it became the property of Napoleon Bonaparte. Two extraordinary items, however, were not found with the thieves. One was the Sancy diamond, a huge pale-yellow stone that had been cut in the shape of two back-to-back crowns. The Sancy, which had been removed from the king’s crown, would resurface in 1828, when it became part of the collection of Count Anatoly Nikolaievich Demidov, whose family eventually sold it to an Indian prince. The prince permitted its public display in Paris at the Exposition Universelle of 1867, offered at a price of one million francs.
The other and more significant missing item from the crown jewels was the French Blue, also known as the King’s Jewel, a legendary gem that has become the most storied stone in human history. The French Blue was never seen again after it was taken from the Royal Storehouse in 1792.
The Blue was believed to have been mined in India’s Golconda kingdom sometime during the sixteenth century. All anyone can say for certain is that the crudely cut stone, approximately 115 carats in size, had come into the possession of a French gem dealer named Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in the middle of the seventeenth century and that Tavernier sold it to Louis XIV around 1668. The king had the diamond recut into a 67.125-carat stone that was fabled for its strange luminescence, the way the gem reflected bluish-gray light on the one hand yet appeared to pulse with a brilliant red phosphorescence when a room was darkened. This effect may have been the beginning of the claim that the diamond was cursed. The king wore it on a ribbon around his neck during ceremonies and made it the centerpiece of a subcollection within the crown jewels called the Order of the Golden Fleece.
It was believed that the French Blue had been smuggled out of France to London sometime between being taken from the Royal Storehouse and Louis XVI’s beheading on January 21, 1793. A story spread that the Blue had been broken into two pieces. The larger of the two, it was said, had been recut into a 42.52-carat stone the size and shape of a pear-shaped pigeon egg and would become known as the Hope Diamond. This was at the very least a disputed claim and there were many stories that the French Blue, along with other pieces of the crown jewels, were held in secret somewhere outside Europe. So back in 1909 there was a place in the popular imagination for the idea that this clandestine location where the Blue was hidden might be Oak Island. Not until 2005 did the claim that the Hope Diamond had been cut from the fractured Blue become more or less official. That was the year scientists at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History announced that they had used computer modeling that involved both the original Tavernier stone, the French Blue, and the Hope Diamond to determine that “the evidence very much supports the theory” that the Hope had been cut from the Blue. Even today, though, there are those who doubt it.
THERE’S NO KNOWN BASIS beyond his say-so for Captain Bowdoin’s announcement that the French crown jewels were hidden on Oak Island, but the claim certainly captured public attention. Bowdoin moved quickly to take advantage. Less than two months after the articles in the Herald and the Times, Bowdoin used the New York Sun to announce that “he had decided that it’s too big a job to tackle without selling a little stock first.” To that end, he had formed a corporation in the Arizona Territory that he called Old Gold Salvage and Wrecking Company. Bowdoin himself wrote the new company’s elaborate prospectus.
“Over one hundred years ago a treasure, estimated to be over ten million dollars, was buried on Oak Island, in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, supposedly by pirates, who took such pains to safeguard it that, although numerous attempts have been made to recover it, it lies undisturbed to this day,” the prospectus began. “These failures were due to lack of modern machinery and ignorance; each expedition being stopped by water and lack of funds.” Technological advances would make the recovery of the treasure on Oak Island “easy, ridiculously easy,” wrote Bowdoin, who explained that he would first locate the treasure in the Money Pit with a newly invented drill that was capable of bringing to the surface a core 2 inches in diameter. Once he and his team knew exactly where the treasure was, they would use the same drill to locate the flood tunnel from Smith’s Cove and seal the tunnel off with sheet piling. Then, “a centrifugal turbine pump, capable of lifting 1,000 gallons per minute—one hundred and fifty feet vertically—will be lowered into the pit from a derrick and the water pumped out. If the tunnel plugs have done their work, the pump will clear out the water; the treasure be easily recovered, and all underground workings explored.”
There was a small possibility that “the tunnel not be located; the pump not be able to keep out the water, and the bucket not bring up all of the treasure,” the prospectus conceded, and if that should be the case, the company would respond by placing one of “Bowdoin’s Air Lock Caissons” into the Money Pit. These watertight chambers were already being used to sink foundations through water and earth all over the planet, Bowdoin explained in his prospectus, and could clearly be applied to the problem of the Money Pit: “Compressed air keeps out all water and allows men to work at the bottom and send any articles up and out through the air lock…. THE TREASURE CAN POSITIVELY BE RECOVERED BY ITS USE.”
Captain Bowdoin offered 250,000 shares of Old Gold Salvage and Wrecking Company stock in lots of ten shares at $1 a share. Promising a dividend of “4,000 percent,” Bowdoin wrote that “operations would begin in May or June and be completed in three or four weeks,” meaning investors would receive their returns before the end of summer.
Even with all the free advertising provided by New York’s daily newspapers, Bowdoin was able to sell only five thousand shares (2 percent) of the Old Gold stock offering during the next three months. Among those who did invest in the company, though, was the most illustrious treasure hunter in the history of Oak Island, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The future four-term US president was then a twenty-seven-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School working as a clerk at the Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn. He had grown up hearing tales of Nova Scotia’s buried treasures during the summers he spent with his family at their summer home on Campobello Island in the Bay of Fundy. In 1896, when he was fourteen, Roosevelt and a classmate from the Groton School had sailed from Campobello to nearby Grand Manan Island, where they spent four days digging for a chest said to have been buried there by Captain Kidd. All the two found was a plank in which some joker had carved “W. K.” Roosevelt was nevertheless captivated by the stories of Oak Island’s Money Pit, and when he read about Captain Bowdoin’s planned expedition to Mahone Bay, he not only purchased ten shares of Old Gold Salvage and Wrecking Company stock, but he also persuaded three friends to do the same. The four young men made a pact that they would join the dig on Oak Island that summer for as long as they could get away from their jobs in New York.
Though vastly undercapitalized, Captain Bowdoin sailed with his men for Nova Scotia on August 19, 1909. It is only from the records kept by Frederick Blair (Old Gold’s vice president) that we know Bowdoin made almost no effort to keep the promise to his investors about locating and blocking the flood tunnel to the Money Pit. The story that the crown jewels of France were hidden in the Money Pit also was abandoned. Almost immediately after arriving on Oak Island, Bowdoin had moved his men and his machinery to the east-end drumlin, where they set up what they called Camp Kidd. What confronted Bowdoin were two open pits side by side. One, assumed to be the Money Pit, measured 5 feet by 7 feet and was heavily cribbed to a depth of 110 feet, most of this being underwater. Right next to this Pit was the shaft dug by the Oak Island Treasure Company in 1899. According to Blair’s notes, the presumed Money Pit was “floored over” at a depth of 30 feet, just above the water that filled it to tide level. Bowdoin’s crew set immediately to opening the Pit by dropping charges of dynamite down the shaft, then used a steam-powered “orange peel” bucket to drag the shattered timbers to the surface. Once the Pit was cleared out down to the waterline, the crew began to rebuild the cribbing as they descended. At a depth of 107 feet, the captain sent a diver down to examine the bottom of the Pit. When the diver returned to the surface, he reported that the cribbing down below was badly damaged and that various planks and timbers were sticking up in all directions from the bottom of the Pit—perhaps a result of the 1861 collapse combined with the dynamite charges Bowdoin had exploded in the shaft.
The captain then commanded that the core drill be put to work. The first borehole went through 17 feet of sand and gravel, then 16 feet of blue clay before striking cement at 149 feet, exactly as Blair had predicted in a letter sent to Bowdoin the previous spring. After passing through 6 inches of cement, the Old Gold crew anticipated that they were about to drill into a treasure chest. Instead, the drill passed through 18 feet of yellow clay before reaching a bedrock composed of gypsum and quartz at 167 feet. Bowdoin and his crew would drive more than two dozen boreholes into the area around the Money Pit, going as deep as 171 feet, but encountered nothing more interesting than layers of cement that ranged between six and ten inches in thickness. (Twenty-two years later, in 1931, one witness to the Bowdoin borings, a man named J. B. Thomson, would claim that he had seen a thin, bright metal disk embedded in one of the core samples, but there’s no mention of it in Blair’s journal of the Old Gold operations.)
By November 1909, Bowdoin had exhausted Old Gold’s scant finances and informed Blair that he could not continue the work. He made an agreement with Blair to resume operations on Oak Island the following summer, but then just a few months later he wrote from England that his business there would make it impossible for him to get back to Nova Scotia before the end of 1911.
If Bowdoin had simply abandoned the project at that point, his attempt would have been merely another failed expedition to Oak Island, memorable mainly for the captain’s grand but empty boasts and because a future US president had made several brief trips to Oak Island during the late summer of 1909 to join the Old Gold crew. However, he was not satisfied “to quit without another try,” Bowdoin wrote to Blair, “and knowing now the exact condition, would get to the bottom and clean things up next time.”
Blair, who was far from impressed by what he had seen of the Old Gold Salvage and Wrecking Company, wrote back that he would be willing to consider a revised proposal from Bowdoin, but only if the captain could demonstrate “that he had sufficient funds on hand, or at his disposal, to complete the work in a proper manner.”
Blair was startled by Bowdoin’s reply:
I believe you had better see us if you come to New York this winter. Advise me ahead. If, however, we cannot get together on the time extension, it will be necessary for me to go to Oak Island and sell the machinery, etc., and when finished, the Company will want a full report which one of our people, a newspaper man, will want to publish. The report that I would have to give them would not help in getting further investments in Oak Island.
Blair, furious, wrote back:
Your letter almost conveys a threat that if we do not permit you to make further tests at Oak Island you will publish such information as would probably prevent the possibility of raising funds for exploration there in the future. Let me say that anything that can be said against Oak Island has already been written, and the publication of any article you might be able to bring forth would not in the least jar those of us who own the lease.
Blair was jarred, though, by what Bowdoin did next. No matter how abjectly Bowdoin might have failed in his probe of the Money Pit, the captain would make a powerful demonstration in the summer of 1911 of how effectively vindictive a man could be when he commanded good connections in the press. Bowdoin’s article “Solving the Mystery of Oak Island” was published in the August 18 edition of Collier’s magazine, one of the most widely read publications in North America. The piece began with the assertion that there had never been any treasure in the Money Pit or on Oak Island, then followed by ridiculing the notion that a 600-foot flood tunnel had been dug from Smith’s Cove to the Pit, when it would have been so much easier to dig a 150-foot tunnel from other parts of the island’s south shore. The water in the Money Pit was not arriving via a tunnel, Bowdoin asserted, but by “percolating” through the soil from the south shore. The captain disputed the story that a ringbolt had been in a boulder on the beach at Smith’s Cove, pointing out that it would have been much easier to tie a line to an oak tree than to drill a hole in rock. Bowdoin also dismissed the claim (made by more than a dozen men who had witnessed it) that links of a chain or anything else of value had been brought up by the pot auger in 1849, because none of it would have stuck to a chisel being raised through 120 feet of water. For good measure, Bowdoin added that he did not believe there were any characters on the stone that had been found in the Money Pit by the Onslow Company in 1805.
Frederick Blair did not have access to a publication as widely read as Collier’s. He replied at length to Bowdoin’s article with one of his own, however, published in the February 23, 1912, edition of Nova Scotia’s Amherst Daily News. Blair first pointed out that Bowdoin had refused to avail himself of the advice offered by any number of men who had been part of previous expeditions to Oak Island and had done almost no exploration before he began to blindly throw dynamite into the Money Pit, destroying most of the cribbing and leaving the rest of the timbers even more out of alignment than they had been when the Old Gold crew arrived. Bowdoin’s pipes and rods had reached into only a small area of the bottom of the Pit, Blair asserted, and most of his borings had been into areas outside the Pit, where of course he had encountered natural formations. In his Collier’s article, Captain Bowdoin had not only failed to explain the work done on the beach at Smith’s Cove, in particular the five man-made drains, but he had also failed to mention their existence at all, Blair pointed out. Bowdoin also had not mentioned the various tests ranging from dynamite blasts to dye drops that had clearly established a man-made connection between the Pit and the south shore or the existence of the air shaft that Sophia Sellers’s oxen had stumbled into back in 1878. Blair noted that on multiple occasions and in the presence of dozens of witnesses it had been shown that water did not “percolate” into the Money Pit, but rather it poured in at the rate of 500 gallons per minute (a hundred more than had been previously measured) and that the water level in the Pit rose and fell with the tides. He wasn’t present—or for that matter even alive—back in 1849 when the links of chain and oak borings had been brought to the surface by the pot auger, Blair admitted, so he could offer only the testimony of those who had been there as evidence. Based on his personal experiences, though, he found the story entirely plausible, because he had seen personally the slivers of oak wood and other items that had come up out of the Money Pit, stuck to the clay on various drill bits. Bowdoin had also failed to mention the copious amounts of coconut fiber and charcoal that came out of the Money Pit and did not even try to explain the log platforms that had been found at 10-foot intervals in the Pit when it was first excavated. Blair seemed especially incensed by Bowdoin’s suggestion that the Money Pit had been “salted” with that famous scrap of parchment. If he or anyone else had wanted to plant evidence of treasure in the Pit, they would have chosen gold or silver, Blair wrote. And it was ridiculous of Bowdoin to suggest that the Treasure Company’s largest investor, Mr. Putnam, had spent himself into bankruptcy in a pointless hunt for a treasure he knew was not there.
Blair was particularly incensed that Bowdoin’s article had relied heavily on a report by three professors associated with Columbia University that described the “so-called cement” as “natural limestone pitted by the action of the water.” Captain Bowdoin was well aware that A. Boake, Roberts and Company, arguably the finest analytical firm in Great Britain, had examined the cement taken out of the Money Pit and produced a report stating that it was almost certainly “man-made,” yet Bowdoin had not mentioned this fact anywhere in his article. That article, Blair closed, had been nothing more than the sour grapes of a man who wanted to continue his exploration of the Money Pit and had been denied by Blair and the other leaseholders.
In spite of Blair’s reply, Bowdoin’s “report,” as he had threatened, indeed made it difficult to obtain “further investments in Oak Island.” Exactly how much negative impact the captain’s Collier’s article made is debatable, but we know for certain that the effort by a Wisconsin professor named S. A. Williams to raise money for a company he called the Oak Island Salvage Company in the summer of 1912 failed miserably. Professor Williams had proposed to solve the problem of the Money Pit by using what was known as the Poetsch method. He would sink a circle of thirty-five holes, each 5 inches in diameter and 3 feet apart, to a depth of 160 feet, Williams wrote in his prospectus. The holes would be lined with metal casings and sealed at the bottom with cement, then pumped dry. He would then drop pipes filled with a solution of calcium chloride chilled to a temperature of 35 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) into each of the casings and in this way create a ring of ice around the Money Pit that would prevent the flood tunnels from reaching the shaft. It had worked at Anzin, France, and would work on Oak Island, the professor asserted, promising that neither he nor any other officers of the company would accept a salary and that every cent raised by the Oak Island Salvage Company’s stock issue would be spent on machinery, labor, and supplies until a “satisfactory sample” of the treasure had been obtained. The prospectus was met by resounding indifference, and Williams was unable to raise enough money to arrange even a visit Oak Island.
THOUGH HIS MOTIVES WERE DESPICABLE and his argument dishonest, Captain Bowdoin had pioneered what would become the main line of attack on the Oak Island “legend.” Eighty-eight years after its publication, Joe Nickell would cite the Collier’s article as a primary source in his own “investigation” of Oak Island. “In 1911 an engineer, Captain Henry Bowdoin, who had done extensive borings on the island, concluded that the treasure was imaginary,” Nickell wrote in his article for the March/April 2000 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer. “He questioned the authenticity of various alleged findings [such as the cipher stone and piece of gold chain], and attributed the rest to natural phenomena.”
Nickell made many of the same factual omissions that Bowdoin had, failing to account for the work on the beach at Smith’s Cove, including the five man-made finger drains. The one solid piece of scientific evidence upon which Nickell relied was a 1911 geological report commissioned by Bowdoin that noted the “numerous” sinkholes on the mainland opposite Oak Island, which Nickell cited as “strong evidence” to indicate that the supposed man-made works on the island were “really but natural sinkholes and cavities.” Nickell cherry-picked the work of various Nova Scotia investigators (every one of whom had concluded that the evidence overwhelmingly supported the story of the Money Pit that had been passed down since the eighteenth century) to support his argument that the Pit was a natural formation. Nickell had been less than straightforward, to say the least, in the ways he attempted to obviate the accounts of those who had been present when the Money Pit was excavated during the early nineteenth century. Those log platforms found in the Pit? Some of the accounts suggested the platforms had been found at “irregular” intervals, rather than at every 10 feet, Nickell noted, then leapt from this to the assertion that “fallen trees could have sunk into the pit with its collapse, or ‘blowdowns’ could periodically have washed into the depression, later giving the appearance of ‘platforms’ of rotten logs.” Nickell simply ignored the accounts of those who were there when the Money Pit was opened and who had found the platforms to be perfectly level and obviously man-made. He similarly dismissed their descriptions of the pick marks on the walls of the shaft. Most far-fetched was Nickell’s contention that the enormous quantity of coconut fiber pulled from the Money Pit could be accounted for by the “sinkhole theory,” which would explain how the fiber might have worked its way into the deep caverns under the island.
Nickell’s explanation for how the coconut fiber had made its way into the Pit was essentially a regurgitation of the contention at the core of the most detailed argument for the sinkhole theory, an article published in the Atlantic Advocate magazine’s October 1965 issue. “Over many thousands of years debris, washed in by high tides and heavy seas, could have accumulated in this fault,” wrote the author, Betty O’Hanlon. She added that “the tropical fiber could have come from the Gulf Stream which passes very near Nova Scotia. Strong gales could have blown the fiber onto the shore, where it would have become trapped in the fissure.”
The main problem with this theory is that the Gulf Stream runs east more than three hundred miles south of Oak Island. And neither Nickell nor O’Hanlon had offered any sort of explanation for how Oak Island, out of more than three hundred other islands in Mahone Bay, along with the hundreds of miles of coastline on Nova Scotia’s south shore, had become the spot where this aberration of nature had taken place. Perhaps the most striking quality of both the Nickell and O’Hanlon articles was that a pair of writers who had attempted to debunk the “will to believe” among Oak Island’s treasure hunters appeared oblivious to the will not to believe that distorted their own work. Their articles and others that have followed are evidence of how thoroughly Captain Henry Bowdoin’s malice infected the Oak Island narrative.
Bowdoin’s attempt to debunk Oak Island apparently made little impact on his investor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose fascination with the place continued throughout his life, even during the years when, as US president, he was consumed with lifting the United States out of the Great Depression and preparing for the country’s entry into World War II. Roosevelt maintained contact with those who had been and were still part of the treasure hunt on Oak Island for more than thirty years and seemingly savored every bit of new information about the island that was produced during that period. On August 31, 1938, during his second presidential term, Roosevelt would reply (on White House stationery) to a letter from Gilbert Hedden, who was leading the current expedition on Oak Island, thusly:
Your note came while I was on my cruise in the Pacific. I wish much I could have gone up the Coast this summer and visited Oak Island and seen the work you are doing—for I shall always be interested in that romantic spot. I hope that you will let me know how you have been getting on with modern methods—ours were, I fear, somewhat antiquated when we were there more than a quarter of a century ago.
Very sincerely yours,
Franklin D. Roosevelt
FDR’s interest notwithstanding, the two decades after Captain Bowdoin’s Collier’s article were marked by one aborted attempt after another to mount a new expedition to Oak Island. The situation was complicated when Frederick Blair was compelled to move his insurance business to Calgary. Even at a remove of three thousand miles, though, Blair maintained his hold on the Money Pit, negotiating a new eight-year lease with Sophia Sellers that lasted until 1921, when Blair signed a revised agreement that gave him control of the Pit and the area around it until 1931.
In 1915, Blair made a new partnership agreement with a syndicate based in Rochester, New York, headed by an engineer named William S. Lozier. The Rochester Group, as it was known, conducted a series of drilling operations at the Money Pit and three other locations during the summer of 1916, but surrendered the effort upon “failing to make any new discoveries,” as Blair’s notes had it. After the Rochester Group left the island, the Money Pit fell into a state of neglect. In November 1920, Blair informed a prospective partner that “the Pit caved in and more or less filled up with the cribbing, the timbers being in every imaginable shape. The ground surrounding the Pit has also caved in more or less and the spaces in and around the Pit are full of water.”
Impenetrable as the Pit had become, there were still those who proposed to make a run at it. In August 1921, Blair signed an agreement with another engineer, Edward Brown of Newark, New Jersey. His plan was to sink a shaft 6 feet by 6 feet about 15 feet from the Money Pit, Brown told Blair. The new shaft would be strongly cribbed and an air lock installed at the top. Brown had concluded based on the available records that there were three treasure boxes in the Money Pit, and he intended to locate them by “sounding with an iron rod,” then tunneling directly to the locations. Brown and his crew went to work on July 4, 1922, but their operations were a comedy of equipment failures and other minor catastrophes. When Blair paid a visit and found that Brown’s drill had never gone deeper than 7 feet, he stopped the work and terminated their agreement.
The detailed record of his ideas and activities that Frederick Blair left behind leaves no doubt that he never stopped believing something of exceptional value had been buried on Oak Island. His fervency was nearly religious and his dealings consistently honorable. During the decade after the Captain Bowdoin fiasco, however, Blair’s behavior suggests at least a whiff of desperation and even, perhaps, a slight degree of hucksterism. Exhibit A in this regard is the advertisement Blair placed in the Boston Journal of Commerce on December 7, 1922, under the heading “Buried Treasure”:
Speculative venture, partly proven, requires $50,000 for half interest. If Successful will produce millions within one year; otherwise possible eighty per cent loss. Satisfactory credentials, proofs partially successful efforts [sic], will prove good sporting effort for party financially able to take chance. Full frank details at interview. 228 F. Journal of Commerce.
The advertisement was straightforward, typical of Blair. The accompanying article, though, written with Blair’s help, was quite a departure. CAN BURIED TREASURE LURE WALL STREET? read the headline above the text:
Two hundred years ago the Welsh buccaneer, Sir Edward [Henry] Morgan, descended on the town of Panama and relieved its inhabitants of as much of their wealth as he could take away. Some years later, when he died Governor of Jamaica, a rich and respected gentleman, the treasure he took from the Spanish Main had disappeared.
The rest of the world apparently has forgotten about this, but there is a man in New York who now says he is certain that this or some other treasure is buried 150 feet deep at a certain spot on Oak Island, near Nova Scotia. Oak Island is one of the 365 islands in the neighborhood, which are not inhabited regularly. This man, a native of Nova Scotia, is here to ‘find men with imagination enough’ to risk some funds in a venture based upon records he possesses, which he believes will conclusively prove that treasure exists at a spot of which he has secured control from the Canadian government.
The story goes back to 1795, when three partridge hunters on Oak Island discovered in the solitary wilderness a place which showed the work of man. To this spot there have come successive parties of treasure hunters, who have dug deeply and have worked out a well-defined pit. After over one hundred years of digging, there has been brought out of this pit cement, timber, salt water, metal, and a piece of parchment about half a square inch in area. However the individual interested, whose announcement appears in this paper, declares he now knows just where the suspected treasure is situated and thinks he can prove he does to any individual interested.
While Blair certainly attracted some attention with this rather overblown pitch, it was not until 1931 that he found the sort of partner he was looking for, who also turned out to be a person he already knew. William Chappell not only had been a member of the Oak Island Treasure Company during its operations on Oak Island in the last years of the nineteenth century, but he was also the man operating the drill that brought the scrap of parchment out of the Money Pit in 1897. In the years since, Chappell and his brothers had prospered as the owners and operators of a string of lumber and sawmills across Nova Scotia. He had never tired, however, of recalling the summers he spent on Oak Island, and over the years he infected his son Melbourne Chappell with what these days is called Oak Island fever. Mel was a member of the Engineering Institute of Canada, William Chappell informed Blair, and he had consulted with the finest mining engineers in the country about how best to recover the cement chamber they had struck with the drill back in 1897. He was advised that a strongly cribbed shaft sunk down to the chamber in which a 450-gallon-per-minute electric pump was employed to keep the work dry should do the trick, and he was prepared to provide financial backing for his son’s plan.
“A man of sterling qualities and character” was how R. V. Harris would describe William Chappell, who like Frederick Blair was “religiously inclined” and fastidious in his habits. Blair was so impressed by the knowledge, ability, and determination of Chappell and son that he closed his insurance office for the summer of 1931 and took up full-time residence on Oak Island to be involved in the day-to-day operations.
William Chappell was quick to identify the crib work in the Money Pit that he said he had helped build back in 1897. Blair disagreed, insisting the Pit lay some distance away. The problem for both men was that the exact location of the Money Pit had become lost during the previous decade, as both it and several of the surrounding shafts had collapsed. After considerable discussion, Blair and William Chappell agreed to sink their new shaft (no. 21) just southwest of the Money Pit and to make it the broadest hole dug on Oak Island to date—12 feet by 14 feet—and to drive it deeper than any previous shaft had gone.
The excavation unearthed a fascinating variety of articles, beginning with an anchor fluke found at 116 feet. (Blair kept this item in his home for the next twenty years, until it disappeared after his death in 1951.) A few feet below the anchor fluke, they discovered an axe head that closely resembled one he had seen on an Acadian axe at the museum in Annapolis Royal, said Blair, who estimated it was 250 years old. A pick was found at 127 feet, as were parts of a miner’s seal-oil lamp. According to Blair’s notes:
From 116 feet 6 inches to 155 feet, the earth in over half of the shaft was much disturbed. How these articles reached a depth of from ten to seventeen feet lower than any searcher ever reached is a question that must be answered. These tools, I believe, belonged to the searchers who worked there many years ago, and had fallen from a much higher level to where found.
Blair wrote that this was evidence to him of an open space beneath what previously had been thought to be the bottom of the Money Pit and into which he believed the treasure chests had fallen. At a depth of about 150 feet, in the softer part of the new shaft, “we commenced to uncover broken up pieces of stone,” Blair went on, that had “the appearance of the so-called cement.” These appeared to have been “dropped or dumped from a higher point,” further convincing him that the treasure had plunged somewhere deeper into the earth when the Money Pit collapsed in 1861.
The question now is, where is the wood and treasure—metal in pieces—which dropped from 100 feet, the iron struck at 126 feet by drillers, the cement and wood drilled into between 153 and 157 feet, and the iron at 171 feet? It appears as if we had gone past them. They certainly must be somewhere in the near vicinity of our Pit.
The Chappell crew believed they might have made a major discovery at 155 feet below the surface, when, as William Chappell’s nephew Claude Chappell recalled it, “we came to a short seam of shale rock and more water started coming in. It was coming in from three or four feet on one side; it wasn’t just coming in from one little hole. It was a round, clearly defined tunnel.” Several of the diggers said this must be the flood tunnel from the south shore.
At a depth of 163 feet, 6 inches, the company began to send tunnels in all directions, “but without locating foreign material,” as Blair put it. “Although the conditions did not appear natural.”
As the summer faded into autumn and the weather worsened, the Chappell expedition started to be bedeviled by a series of near catastrophes. The electrical system running the pump was damaged repeatedly by storms, and the pump’s subsequent failures almost cost men their lives. The nearest miss involved Chappell’s foreman, George Stevenson, who was in the tunnel at the 157-foot level when suddenly rising water caused the earth to soften and the walls of the tunnel to collapse. Stevenson was nearly entombed before his men pulled him out—covered head to toe in mud and gasping for breath—by the rope attached to his waist. Subsequent accidents over the next few days resulted in two other men suffering broken ribs. Finally, on October 29, 1931, bowing to the weather, the Chappell crew suspended work. Blair was “more convinced than ever—if that be possible—that there is treasure there,” he wrote in his journal two days later. He and the Chappells agreed that work would resume in the spring of 1932. William Chappell’s brothers, though, were unhappy that he had spent $40,000 without anything tangible to show for it other than some old artifacts. The Great Depression was finally hitting home even in Nova Scotia, and their receipts were dwindling, the Chappell brothers said. They could not agree to support further efforts on Oak Island.
William Chappell’s counterargument became moot when Sophia Sellers died that year and Blair was unable to persuade her heirs to let him renew his lease on the Money Pit. Early in 1932, a New York engineer named John Talbot showed up in Nova Scotia and said he was representing a “financial interest” headed by the wealthy heiress Mary B. Stewart. Talbot apparently offered the heirs enough to gain their permission to spend seven weeks on Oak Island drilling in and around the Money Pit. He found nothing of note and abandoned the effort when his drill broke at a depth of about 50 feet just northwest of what had become known as the Chappell shaft. In the end, the most notable result of the New York concern’s foray on Oak Island was the disappearance of the famous ivory boatswain’s whistle that had been found in 1885. It was delivered to Mary B. Stewart in Manhattan in August 1932 and has never been seen since.
“If we had that whistle, and could date it, we might know who did the original work on Oak Island,” Rick Lagina would tell me sorrowfully in August 2016.
“Might” and “know,” I found myself thinking, could be the two most fraught words in the history of Oak Island.