Robert Dunfield became the great malefactor of the Oak Island story not for how he treated Mildred Restall, but for how he treated the island itself. Dunfield’s motives may not have been as petty as Colonel Henry Bowdoin’s, but the blunt instrument methods the man employed have delivered him to infamy. Whether that is entirely fair can be argued. That it is just in general is beyond dispute.
The most generous assessment is that Melbourne Chappell and Robert Dunfield decided that since everything else had been tried they might as well declare war on Oak Island and get this thing over with once and for all. Only later would Chappell realize that Dunfield was not everything he appeared to be when he first arrived in Nova Scotia. He was not, for instance, from Beverly Hills but rather from the modest San Fernando Valley suburb of Canoga Park. In 1965, Dunfield was a thirty-nine-year-old UCLA graduate who had made some money drilling oil wells, but not so much that he could personally finance a major operation on Oak Island. To proceed, he had needed investors and found three. There were two other Californians who had made money from oil wells, G. R. Perle of Bakersfield and Jack Nethercutt, whose Beverly Hills home address Dunfield had used on some business documents, giving rise to the wealthy image. The third investor was Dan Blankenship, a successful building contractor from Miami, Florida, whose name would eventually become as closely associated with Oak Island as any in history.
With the backing of his investors, Dunfield had begun work on Oak Island less than a month after Robert Restall and his son were buried. He started by barging two bulldozers out to the island and with them made clear immediately that he was going to leave his mark on the place. The dozers skimmed 12 feet of soil off the drumlin where the Money Pit was located and dumped it by the tons onto the man-made beach at Smith’s Cove. He succeeded in exposing what all agreed was some of the cribbing of the original Pit, but he had no success at all in stopping the inflow of water. So Dunfield went large.
In ten days in early October, he built the causeway that has made it possible for countless people (me among them) to drive across a narrow stretch of Mahone Bay from the mainland. Boats and barges had been the only way to reach Oak Island since the beginning of time, and the 15,000 cubic yards of fill that Dunfield used to construct the causeway created a transformation that was dramatic, but not entirely appreciated. The first enemies Dunfield made in Nova Scotia, in fact, were the fishermen who for two centuries had been using the narrow protected passage between Crandall’s Point and Oak Island to access the deeper waters of the bay. Going that way not only shortened the trip for fishing boats, but allowed for a much gentler transition to the sea. I understood how jarred Mahone Bay’s fishing fleet must have been by the change Dunfield wrought one day when I rented a kayak at my hotel in Western Shore and set out to paddle around Oak Island. The gentle waves created by the combination of the island and the breakwaters offshore let me cross the inward bay with surprising ease; my greatest difficulties were negotiating the rocks and massive yellow-brown kelp beds when I got too close to shore. When I paddled around the eastern tip of the island though—the elephant’s nose, Rick Lagina called it—the change was shockingly sudden. The waves here were abruptly two, three, four times as high as they had been just a couple of minutes earlier, and they fell with choppy gray violence all around. It dawned on me very quickly that I was paddling in the Atlantic Ocean. My tiny kayak took on water at an alarming rate, becoming increasingly unstable. I spun it around finally and paddled hard back the way I came, making for a landing spot where I could tip the kayak and empty it before it dumped me into the sea. Gasping from the exertion and momentary panic, I understood how infuriating it must have been to the captains and crews of the fishing boats who found themselves not only adding twenty minutes to their outbound commute but also being forced to deal with the ocean from almost the moment they left the mainland shore. On bad weather days—and there are a lot of them in Nova Scotia—they must have been truly pissed off. And they let Dunfield know it.
If that bothered him, Dunfield didn’t show it. The first thing he did with his new causeway, the day after its completion on October 17, 1965, was haul out a 70-foot-tall crane that was equipped with a 3-yard link belt “clam-digger” bucket capable of removing 800 cubic yards per hour. Right behind the crane and clam digger was a truck loaded with pumping equipment that could remove 111,000 tons of water per hour.
Dunfield headed his heavy equipment straight for the south shore, where he ran two shifts of crews numbering up to a dozen men in an all-out effort to block the flow of seawater into the Money Pit. The work began with the excavation of a huge trench 22 feet deep and 200 feet long, parallel to shoreline. Dunfield claimed to have found a previously undiscovered shaft at a depth of 60 feet where “water rushed in, giving us the evidence of a new flood system leading into the Money Pit.” He had confirmed the dye tests made by William Chappell in 1898, when the red dye had come out at three points on the south shore, Dunfield said, and this was one of the places the dye had leaked into the bay.
The clam digger had been scraping against rock-hard clay up to that point, when suddenly the bucket dropped 3 feet in soft ground. They had entered an 8-foot-square pocket of refill—beach rock, beach sand, eel grass, and other vegetation—that was clearly the work of human hands. He and his crew were on the brink of uncovering the main sources of the flood trap, Dunfield said, but a week of probing in all directions with the clam digger at a depth of 60 feet revealed no branch that led to the Money Pit and in the end all Dunfield had accomplished was to wreak even more havoc on the south shore than his bulldozers had done on the beach at Smith’s Cove.
In early November Dunfield directed his men and equipment back to the Money Pit. Within two weeks the clam digger had opened a shaft 50 feet wide and 98 feet deep that encompassed both the Money Pit and the Hedden and the Chappell shafts and erased much of what had been left behind on the east-end drumlin. Ten days later the massive hole was 148 feet deep. Dunfield estimated that he had another 48 feet to go, and he told reporters that either he would reach the treasure or “call it quits.” The owner of the crane, however, chose that moment to remind Dunfield that he had a contract to use it elsewhere. Dunfield had foreseen this eventuality and swiftly brought in a replacement with a 90-foot boom. Almost immediately, though, the machine was beset by a series of mechanical problems that included a blown gasket and a cracked engine block. Many of the crane’s “broken” cables had actually been cut with hacksaws, said Mel Chappell, who accused local fishermen bent on punishing Dunfield for the causeway of being the saboteurs.
When his workmen demanded a holiday over Christmas, Dunfield busied himself by making a complete examination of debris from the Money Pit, all of which had been run through an enormous sluice with a water-filtration system. The only things of note he found in the debris were shards of porcelain dishware and old drill casings that he assumed were from previous expeditions, Dunfield said. When he examined the pit his clam digger had created, though, he found exposed old timbers and hard clay walls with pick marks in them, the last remaining evidence of the original excavation and proof of where exactly the Money Pit was located.
Persistent rain had begun to fall in early December and by the time his crews returned to Oak Island, Dunfield was faced with a pit where daily slides had filled it nearly to the top with sand and soil. He ordered a “reexcavation,” but the slides continued and progress was slow. He would deal with the weather by widening the diameter of the hole to 100 feet so that the sides would be gently sloped, then go down to a depth of 184 feet, Dunfield said. He was essentially proposing to turn the top of Oak Island’s east drumlin into an enormous crater. The rain continued, though, and so did the slides. The work was now costing Dunfield USD $2,000 a day and on January 2, 1966, he ordered his crew to halt the excavation, refill the pit with soft soil, and prepare to begin again the following summer.
Dunfield wasn’t done, though. He had a huge oil-drilling rig hauled out to the island and used it to bore four 6-inch holes down to a depth of 140 feet. At 139 feet the drill dropped into a chamber with a 2-foot wooden roof that went all the way down to 184 feet.
The half ton of material the drill brought up was sent to the University of Southern California for spectrographic analysis. Other than saying that the drill had struck cast iron on the floor of the “chamber,” Dunfield refused to reveal what the USC lab had found. But he did announce that he would proceed with his plan to dig out the Money Pit on a huge scale when the weather was drier.
In an interview with local reporters, Dunfield said he was certain that “somewhere on the surface of the island there is an entrance to the treasure chamber.” It would be on higher ground, according to Dunfield, who said he had been convinced of this by the pockets of “dry, stale air” his drill had found. In the same interview, though, Dunfield revealed that he had already spent $120,000, nearly three times what he had estimated, and that if he did not recover the treasure by the end of the summer of 1966, he would go back to drilling oil wells until he made up his losses.
Dunfield never really mounted a major operation in the summer of 1966, though. The problem, he said, was that his lease with Chappell was going to expire soon, and he had come to the conclusion that he needed to own the island to justify the level of commitment required. He issued a press release that “several friends in the oil business have stated that they were willing to buy the treasure island area and are interested in the negotiations.” The main effect of the press release was a loud howl of outrage from the Municipal Council of Chester, which was soon joined by a number of other Lunenburg County organizations in entreating the Nova Scotia provincial government to declare Oak Island a national historic park and keep it out of Dunfield’s hands.
By then, word of the destruction Dunfield had wrought on Oak Island was spreading throughout Mahone Bay and beyond. The east end and south shore of the island were devastated, those who visited reported. The few days of excavating Dunfield had done at the Cave-in Pit had left it a shapeless hole filled with water. The finger drains at Smith’s Cove were broken apart and buried, and the drilled boulder nearest to the cove was gone, never to be recovered. Worse, Dunfield’s trench on the south shore had opened so wide during the rainy season that it swallowed the stone triangle whole, and a feature that many thought was key to solving the Oak Island mystery was lost forever.
In the end the provincial government had elected to acquire Grave’s Island rather than Oak Island as its new historic park, but by then Robert Dunfield had fled Nova Scotia and would never return. “Nuking the island” was how Dunfield’s work was described by Nova Scotia surveyor and historian William Crooker, who claimed that because of the California man “a vast amount of ‘visual history’ was lost.”
Not everyone agreed. Canadian journalist D’Arcy O’Connor wrote that Dunfield deserved credit for rediscovering the site of the original Money Pit and for helping stem the flow of water to the Pit from the south shore flood tunnel.” Reacting to my 2004 observation in Rolling Stone that Dunfield was “widely regarded as the greatest villain in the Oak Island story,” his son Robert Dunfield Jr. (a stakeholder in a subsequent search operation on the island) complained this was unfair. His father’s “approach may have been heavy-handed,” Dunfield Jr. conceded. “But very little credit is given to the positive aspects of his work” or to the toll that it took on the man. “My father aged ten years in only two years. He put his heart and soul into the effort.”
One day in July 2016, as I stood with Rick and Marty Lagina on what was left of Oak Island’s east-end drumlin, I asked the brothers if they thought I had been in any way unfair to Dunfield. I told them I had been heavily influenced by what I had heard from Rick Restall in 2003 about his first return trip to Oak Island after he and his mother had moved to the mainland. “When I went back, I was shocked by how the island had changed,” Rick had said. “The hilltops had been hacked off, the Money Pit looked like a giant bomb crater, the beach at Smith’s Cove had been buried—even the shoreline had changed. I felt sick.”
My description of Dunfield as a villain had been fair in his view, Marty Lagina said. Rick didn’t disagree, but the older brother, who I would come to know as a man who looked for the good in everyone, said this: “What people need to remember is that Dunfield truly believed he was going to find the treasure. And if he had, no one would have cared what he had done to the island.”
“But he didn’t find the treasure,” Marty said.
“That’s right. He didn’t,” Rick agreed. “So he’s paid the price of failure. Lots of people have done that on Oak Island.”
FOR A FULL HALF CENTURY after Robert Dunfield quit the island, right up to the time that the Lagina brothers showed up in 2006, the treasure hunt was dominated by two men whose heroic efforts and remarkable discoveries were constantly overshadowed by the bitter rivalry between them. One was Dan Blankenship. The other was Fred Nolan.
Blankenship was the one I met first when I came to Oak Island in 2003 and also the one who provided me with the greatest assistance in researching and writing the Rolling Stone article. That assistance, though, was not obtained easily. He’d “had it up to here” with reporters, Blankenship told me the first time I got him on the phone, and he hadn’t let one on the island in years. “You’re all looking to stir up trouble,” he said in a voice that made his words sound as if he were chewing them up before he spat them out. Not me, I replied with as much self-assurance as I could muster. All I wanted to do was bring the story of Oak Island up to date for readers who had mostly never heard of the place. I’d already learned that being a writer for the Rolling Stone was not the advantage in Mahone Bay that it was in most other places I’d visited in the twenty-plus years I’d been writing for the magazine, but Dan Blankenship drove the point home. “I guess I’ve heard of your publication,” he said. “But I’ve never looked at it. Was started by a bunch of hippies for kids who wanted to read about rock music, wasn’t it?” I told him it was just one hippie, who now wore an expensive haircut and $5,000 suits. “I just don’t see what good it would do me to talk to you,” Blankenship said. The best I could do was get him to agree to think it over, which gave me a reason to call back the next day and convince him to come over to the Oak Island Inn, where I was staying, to let me buy him a drink and see what he thought when he met me in person.
He stalked into the hotel bar that evening like a man who didn’t want to be bothered by any damn tourists and made me start the conversation with the two of us standing pretty much toe-to-toe next to the table I had been saving for our meeting. He was imperious and irascible and, to me, impressive. Just a few months shy of his eightieth birthday, Blankenship was still a lantern-jawed, big-shouldered bull of a man who had no trouble convincing me that he had cleared out more than a few bars with his fists when he was younger. Still, there was a twinkle in his eyes and a smile he barely suppressed when he tried to provoke me. As it happened, he was a lot like my father, and Blankenship started to soften up when I told him my dad had been a longshore foreman who more or less ran the docks in Portland, Oregon. He even seemed to start liking me a little about a half hour later, because I not only knew what a come-along was, but I had also used one to move some boulders on a piece of property in Woodstock, New York. By then we were sitting down over one apiece of Dan’s favorite beverage, a gin martini, dry with olives. When the old man finished his drink, he told me to meet him at the chained-off entrance to the causeway the next morning and he’d bring me up to his house to continue the conversation “and see how much of my time I think you’re worth.” Given that we spent most of the next forty-eight hours in each other’s company, I think it would be fair to say the meeting at the house went well.
At least part of the reason we hit it off was that I didn’t hear braggadocio as much as a simple statement of fact when Dan told me, “I made the decision to come up here in the first place because I had never met an obstacle I couldn’t overcome.” Blankenship was a highly successful forty-two-year-old building contractor who had just finished the construction of a hospital in Palm Beach, Florida, in 1965, when he picked up a copy of Reader’s Digest that contained an article about Oak Island condensed and reprinted from the Rotarian magazine under the title “Oak Island’s Mysterious ‘Money Pit.’”
“As soon as I learned about this place, I knew it was the greatest unsolved mystery in the world, and I believed I was the man to solve it.” A little later, when I met his wife, Jane, she told me wistfully how different her life might have been if she’d “never let Dan see that damn magazine.” Once Dan had seen that damn magazine, though, there was no stopping him from making a trip to Nova Scotia to take a look.
Robert Restall was running the treasure hunt at that time, though, and Restall was wary of strangers who showed up there, especially if they were being shown around by Mel Chappell—M. R., as Blankenship was already calling him. Even among those potential interlopers, however, Blankenship was standing in line behind Robert Dunfield, who had taken over the treasure hunt within days of the Restall tragedy. So he invested $21,000 in Dunfield’s operation, Dan explained, becoming one of the California man’s several limited partners: “Dunfield was going at it the wrong way, but he was my only way in.”
Dunfield was gone within a year and Blankenship needed no more than a day or two to persuade Chappell that he was every bit the man he thought he was. Becoming M. R.’s designated treasure hunter was no easy task, though, when Blankenship also had a construction business to run and three children to support back in Miami. For seven years or so he split his life in two, Dan told me, spending his winters in Florida with Jane and their three children, working long days on his company’s building projects and spending his summers in Nova Scotia, focused on solving the mystery of Oak Island. “That’s how committed I was to figuring this thing out,” he said. He stayed for weeks on end in Halifax, poring over the records in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia, the bulk of them collected by Frederick Blair and R. V. Harris. The rest of the time he lived and worked out of a motel in Western Shore, interviewing everyone he could find who had been part of previous expeditions, including not only Mel Chappell, but also Gilbert Hedden and Edwin Hamilton.
One of the earliest conclusions he drew, Dan explained, was that the log platforms that had been found in the Money Pit by the Onslow Company were intended by the people who had done the original work to reduce the compaction of the soil over the years, so that it would subside into only a slight dent in the ground rather than a deep crater and help conceal the Pit. “Clearly they weren’t planning on tearing out those platforms to gain access to the treasure when they came back,” he told me. “That meant they must have another way to reach it.” The key to finding that other way in, Blankenship decided, was to do what so many before had tried and failed to do—stop the flow of water into the Money Pit area. “I thought I was just a little smarter than the other guys,” Dan admitted.
He hired botanists and geologists to confirm the construction of the artificial beach at Smith’s Cove and to study whatever was left of the five-fingered drainage system there. After mapping out his rough diagram of the flood system, Blankenship laid out plans for an elaborate drilling program and for a series of excavations that would be based on what he found with the drill.
The one thing he hadn’t really worked out, however, was how he was going to pay for his elaborate operations. “I was becoming so focused on Oak Island that my construction business was suffering, and so were my finances,” Dan told me, lowering his voice slightly, so that Jane, who was in the next room, wouldn’t hear him. The truth was that despite a business that was still netting six figures annually, by early 1967 he was “starting to feel the strain, financially.” It was at that moment that David Tobias entered his life.
Tobias had first visited Oak Island in 1943, back when Edwin Hamilton was still running the treasure hunt. Tobias had been a young Royal Canadian Air Force officer training as a combat pilot at the Maitland, Nova Scotia, base when he heard about the island and its history. He made the long drive south on a free day to take a look and left unimpressed. Why they didn’t just dig up whatever was down there escaped him completely, he would admit with a laugh sixty years later. It was only in 1963, when he read a newspaper article about Robert Restall’s search operation, that he became fascinated enough to invest $20,000 in the project. Tobias had the money to spare; apart from a share of his family’s considerable investment portfolio, he was the owner of a very successful Montreal company called Jongerin Inc. that manufactured labels and packaging. Not only was that $20,000 gone after Restall’s death in 1965, but also Tobias found himself on the outside looking in as Robert Dunfield tore the island apart during the next year.
In early 1967, though, after Dunfield headed back to California, Tobias approached Mel Chappell and told him about a Toronto company called Becker Drilling Ltd. that was working with a new type of drill, one that operated inside a pipe that was pounded into the ground with a pile-driving hammer. Once the drill bit was sent to the bottom of the pipe, a constant stream of high-velocity air pressure sent the cuttings back up through the pipe. It offered a tremendous advantage over any other piece of equipment so far invented for the recovery of artifacts from underground. A compact man with bright eyes who spoke with remarkable self-assurance, Tobias impressed Chappell enormously, especially when the Montreal man offered to pay for the Becker drilling program on Oak Island personally (at a cost of $130,000) in exchange for two-thirds of whatever treasure was recovered.
Dan Blankenship was even more excited than Chappell about the Becker program Tobias had proposed, but he was not exactly thrilled that Tobias was going to claim two-thirds of the Oak Island treasure if it succeeded. During the previous year, working on a limited budget, Blankenship had made what followers of the Oak Island story considered to be a series of spectacular discoveries after deepening the Dunfield shaft on the island’s south shore. At a depth of 60 feet, Dan had uncovered a handwrought nail that was at least three hundred years old and another artifact that was described as either “a nut or washer” formed out of the same primitive low-carbon steel. At 90 feet down the shaft, Blankenship found a layer of round granite stones, each about the size of a man’s head, lying in a pool of stagnant black water. He was positive he’d discovered a branch of the south shore flood system, and Chappell was inclined to agree. Blankenship spent months trying to crib and deepen the Dunfield shaft, but he lacked the funds to do it properly and was forced to abandon the effort when earth began to collapse the sides of the pit. Exhausted and tapped out, he was receptive when Tobias approached to explain that he was too busy running his company in Montreal to take charge of the Becker program on Oak Island and needed a “field operation director.” Blankenship agreed to take the job for a small salary and a cut of the treasure if the Becker drill located it.
The Becker program began on Oak Island in January 1967 and continued for eight months. His preliminary goal, Tobias told Blankenship, was to prove beyond doubt that there were “man-made underground workings” on Oak Island. And these could only be identified as such at 150 feet or more underground, he said, because only when one went deeper than previous searchers could one be certain that what was found was connected to the original work. Only if he saw the evidence with his own eyes, Tobias said, would he keep the project going.
As far as both Blankenship and Tobias were concerned, that evidence came quickly. The Becker drill would sink 49 six-inch diameter holes in and around the Money Pit area during the eight months it was operating on the island, and only about a dozen of those holes had been bored before Tobias was convinced that they had found the proof they were looking for. Exploration using the Becker drill had established that the bedrock in the Money Pit area began at a depth of about 160 feet, with variances of up to 10 feet in either direction. That was bearing in mind that Dunfield had scraped away enough of the “overburden soil” from the island’s east-end drumlin to lower the ground level by about 12 feet from where it had originally been. The bedrock was mostly anhydrite (crystallized calcium sulfate), with some seams of gypsum and limestone in the upper layers. The Becker drill found its first cavity at about 40 feet down in the bedrock, covered on top by two layers of wood that were each several inches thick and separated by a thin layer of blue clay. After passing through the wood, the drill had dropped through a void that was 6 to 8 feet deep before again striking bedrock.
The materials that came out of the drill’s tube were fragments of china, cement, wood, charcoal, and metal, including brass that was shown by spectrographic analysis to possess high levels of impurities, meaning the brass was “smelted early,” though putting a specific date on its age was not possible. Most exciting, though, were the oak buds found in the blue clay. Geologists said the seeds of oak trees could not possibly have been deposited by the glacial movements that had formed Oak Island, which could only mean they had been placed in the clay by human activity—170 feet belowground. Samples of a “bricklike” material had also been brought to the surface by the Becker drill. Testing by mineralogists confirmed that this material had been exposed to intense heat at some former time. The speculation was that a primitive kiln had operated far below the surface of the island to make and repair iron tools. The charcoal mostly had been used to fire the kiln. The cement was submitted for analysis by experts at Canada Cement LaFarge who identified it as a primitive type that had been common during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Steel Company of Canada (Stelco) examined the metal pieces brought up from the bedrock and reported that they were at least several hundred years old. The wood that had come back from the deepest levels penetrated by the Becker drill was originally carbon-dated to 1585, but that estimate was plus or minus eighty-five years. A more thorough carbon-14 analysis was performed by Harold Krueger of Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In his report, Krueger cautioned that since it was impossible to know how old the tree had been when it was cut, he could only say that he had found a 67 percent probability that the wood’s age fell between 1490 and 1660. To calculate the tree’s age with 95 percent accuracy, Krueger wrote, he would have to expand the possible date range to between 1405 and 1745.
For Blankenship, the interesting moment during the Becker drilling had come when the drill was at a depth of 198 feet, only to be absolutely stopped by hitting hard metal. He and the drill operator agreed that it must be metal because of the high keening noise that came up through the tube. “It took us close to half an hour just to bore through a half inch of it,” he recalled. “I was tremendously excited to see what it was, but when we tried to bring up the core sample we lost it. I ask you, what would metal hard enough to stop a drill be doing almost two hundred feet belowground? People had to have put it there.”
He had done a good deal of searching on his own away from the Money Pit during the months of the Becker drilling program, Dan told me, mostly at Smith’s Cove. Dunfield had destroyed most of the old five-fingered feeder drain system, but there were some sections left and he had spent weeks probing them with a shovel. One of the things he had turned up was a heart-shaped stone that had been chiseled. Another was an old set square that metallurgists dated to before 1780. His most amazing discovery had been a pair of handwrought iron scissors that he had pulled from beneath one of the drains. Mendel Peterson, the former curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s Historical Archeology division, examined the scissors and said they were of a type made and used by the Spaniards in Mexico during the mid- and late 1600s, though he had added that they might have been made more recently than that.
“The stone and the set square might have been left by early searchers,” Blankenship told me. “Probably were. But those scissors, it’s almost certain that they were used by the people who did the original work on Oak Island to cut up the coconut fiber and the manila grass that was used as a screen under the artificial beach.” I remarked it was hard to know the difference between what was almost certain and what was a distinct possibility. This raised one of Dan’s shaggy eyebrows, but he let it pass.
For David Tobias, the most compelling discovery during the Becker program was made when the drill entered a previously undiscovered chamber about 30 feet in diameter, extending from depths between 160 and 190 feet, almost directly beneath the Hedden shaft. It was riddled with holes that were filled with a heavy, puttylike blue clay in which layers of small stones were found at semiregular 18-inch intervals. Colin Campbell, a former army general and mining engineer who was considered Canada’s leading historian of underground workings, wrote a report in which he stated that the clay almost certainly had been puddled on the surface, then poured into the holes in layers. Small stones in the clay would sink to the bottom of each layer and produce the sort of stratification found in the drill cores. Before the development of cement, Campbell noted, clay had been commonly used as a water seal in underground workings.
Tobias was heartened by Campbell’s conclusion that an enormous amount of human effort had gone into the creation of the Money Pit and the flood system, sometime before the middle of the eighteenth century. “A large number of men were engaged for a few years driving various shafts, inclined and lateral headings, some of which were apparently prepared for flooding in order to discourage any inquisitive searchers,” Campbell had written. A little later he added, “In my opinion the early operations by the ‘pirates’ or other parties were too elaborate and well planned to be for any minor venture and therefore it is reasonable to assume that the operations were for the purpose of hiding treasure which must be of great value to warrant the effort.”
The Becker drillings, combined with the conclusions Campbell drew from them, were more than enough to convince both Tobias and Blankenship that they had proved the existence of man-made tunnels with ceilings of wooden planks shored with logs that had been dug at depths of up to 200 feet or more below the island’s surface. He was now all in with the treasure hunt, Tobias said, and ready to start reaching out to other people of means who could help him finance it on the scale it merited.
This took a bit longer than expected, but by April 1969 Tobias had put together Triton Alliance, a limited partnership in which he and Blankenship were joined by “a largely unidentified group of some of Canada’s wealthiest and best known businessmen,” as Toronto’s Financial Post would put it. The investors did not remain unidentified for long. They included the past president of the Toronto Stock Exchange, the chairman of the board for one of Canada’s two largest supermarket chains, and a former Nova Scotia attorney general, along with a handful of Americans, among them the wealthy Boston land developer Charles Brown. Together, they were prepared to put $500,000 into the operation, according to Tobias, who told the Financial Post: “We are the first people to know what to expect and what we are after.”
Dan Blankenship had been at it long enough to know that nobody ever knew what to expect on Oak Island. “Even I, though, didn’t imagine all the trouble Fred Nolan could make for us,” he admitted.