One of my favorite parts of the show had been the relationship that developed between Fred Nolan and Rick Lagina. I was quite familiar with how difficult Fred could be and how hard he made people work to get any kind of information about Oak Island out of him. Rick, though, had won him over as thoroughly as anyone ever had. Part of this transformation was that Fred had finally begun to face his mortality. He was eighty-seven when Rick met him, and far more gaunt and frail looking than he’d been even back in 2003. I came to realize that it was Rick’s enthusiasm for the treasure hunt combined with his respect for those who had conducted it that largely made the relationship with Fred work. Rick’s demeanor was entirely genuine and a big part of what contributed to his winning personality, onscreen and off. Honoring those who’d come before him was to Rick an important reason for the show’s existence and his participation in it. Fred had come to acknowledge that, and some of the frost on the old fellow had melted. “I don’t want to be an obstacle anymore,” he had told Rick at one point. “I’m too old for that now.”
This didn’t mean, of course, that Fred was prepared to share everything he knew. I was amazed that Rick had been able to get Fred to confess during one of their off-camera conversations that just as Dan Blankenship suspected, he had moved many of the objects and markers he’d found on Oak Island over the years. Their original locations, though, were all recorded on his map of the island, Fred said. That map was Nolan’s life’s work, a chart on which he’d recorded more than fifty years of discovery on Oak Island. After weeks of back and forth, he had finally agreed to share it with Rick, on camera, and that was no small thing. To my knowledge, Fred had never let another living soul see his map. The scene in which this was supposed to happen, though, was a complete fiasco. First, Fred had presented Rick with what he said was his map but turned out to be something else. Rick told me it was the only time he’d ever lost his temper with Fred. After Fred more or less confessed to what he’d done, he agreed to let Rick, and Rick alone, see his map at his house on Joudrey’s Cove. When Rick arrived at the appointed time, however, there was no answer to his knock. He didn’t know if Fred was inside pretending not to be home or had actually left, but he’d never gotten to see the map.
Now Rick was concerned that he never would. Fred had died at age eighty-nine on June 6, 2016, about six weeks before my arrival in Nova Scotia. It wasn’t until the show aired the following November that I saw the scene where Rick went to Dan Blankenship’s house to tell him Fred had passed. Recalling how Dan had cursed Nolan for the things he’d done to conceal or disguise his discoveries over the years, it was strangely moving to hear him observe that while Fred was “a little bit on the secretive side,” so were most treasure hunters, himself included.
Rick was struggling now with his concern that all of Nolan’s research might never be seen, at least by him. Fred’s son, who felt he had already lost his father to Oak Island many years earlier, was said to be despondent about facing that this loss was now permanent, and he was nowhere near ready to make decisions about how to dispose of the enormous collection of objects and documents Fred had accumulated in more than fifty years on Oak Island. Promises that had been made to Rick but never put in writing were just whispers in the wind now and it seemed inevitable that the son would soon realize his father’s research was worth money—perhaps a lot of money—to someone somewhere.
The older Lagina brother sounded sincere, though, when he observed that what pained him most was that Fred had not lived until the end of this year. Because in the summer of 2016 he and Marty and the rest of them were poised to make a search of the island that would be more comprehensive than all they’d done in the previous three seasons of The Curse of Oak Island. That sounded a trifle grandiose to me, until I paid my first visit to the Money Pit since 2003. It was a different place.
The production had kept me away from the Money Pit for my first week on Oak Island, preferring to shoot scenes of me doing research at the Genealogical Society, among other locations. I knew something major was happening at the east-end drumlin, though, because of the steady stream of big trucks that were carrying loads of gravel in that direction. Rick—and Marty especially—seemed very excited about what was going on, but all the details were withheld from me so my initial reaction to the changes taking place could be caught on camera. Both my astonishment and mixed emotions were genuine when Rick and Marty walked me to the high spot that provided an overview of what had once been the crown of the east-end drumlin but was now an acre-sized, three-foot-thick platform of gravel. It was utterly unrecognizable as the place I had first seen thirteen years earlier. In 2003, in spite of all that had been visited on the east-end drumlin in the previous two centuries, the Money Pit area still had the quality of a living history. This was mainly due to all the wrecked, broken or abandoned machinery and other equipment that had been pushed to the side each time a new expedition arrived on Oak Island, offering mute testimony of what had taken place. The ghosts of Frederick Nolan, Gilbert Hedden, Melbourne Chappell, Robert Restall and, yes, even Robert Dunfield had haunted the place. They were gone now.
The enormous pad of gravel, which was still being built up with dump truck load after dump truck load, then spread by bulldozers, would be necessary to support the three-hundred-ton crane that would hoist the caissons (steel chambers, air locked at the top, whose air pressure would repel the water below the work area) that were then to be driven into the ground by an oscillator that itself weighed five tons. One location where the first 40-inch-wide metal cylinder would be put down was called C1 because it had been chosen by Charles Barkhouse as his best guess as to the location of the original Money Pit. That seemed appropriate; Charles knew as much or more than anyone about the history of Oak Island and his guess was likely to be an informed one.
The prep work had been going on for weeks already, beginning with the construction of a new road that had been built to accommodate the enormous rigs required to carry the two cranes (the second was a mere hundred-ton model) that would be used to lift, lower, and place the caissons. While the pad was being created, the Laginas and the rest of the cast had been spending a good deal of their time in one of the two other locations that had been selected as the focus of this season’s efforts on Oak Island. That, of course, was the swamp, which the Laginas had obtained permission from Fred Nolan, before his death, to drain as much water from as possible.
The stated goal of that summer’s work in the swamp was to determine whether it had formed naturally centuries earlier or was man-made, and whether Nolan’s theory that a ship had been deliberately sunk there to conceal the treasure it carried held any water. “Why are there stumps in the swamp?” Marty asked. “Because trees grew there once, obviously.”
They had already spent $2 million in the Money Pit area that summer, but what they were doing in the swamp was costing even more, Marty told me. The first find they had been rewarded with was the 18-foot-long wooden plank Tony Sampson brought up from just below the surface of the water. It had to be either deck or side planking from a masted ship all agreed. Considering how thin the plank was, it seemed almost certain it was from the ship’s deck. A company called Beta Analytic ran carbon-dating tests and came back with a report that the ship had been built sometime between 1680 and 1735, with 90 percent likelihood. As this was being explained to me, I had the feeling for the first time that the search was actually getting somewhere.
Once 90 percent of the water in the swamp had been pumped out (and, for environmental reasons, into the Cave-in Pit), the backhoe was brought in to lift out bucket upon bucket of foul-smelling muck that would be dumped into an enclosure made of hay bales and sandbags that the crew called the cattle pen. Jack Begley, my favorite by far among the younger people on the show, in part because he was always willing to take on a dirty job, was literally covered with the filth of the cattle pen as he swept it with a metal detector. Then the man who had been chosen as the best at locating metal objects in this kind of slimy mess, Gary Drayton, arrived to take over, scanning the cattle pen with his own, more high-powered detector. Drayton was a sturdy Brit with a piping voice and a charming sense of humor who wore a billed cap to cover his bald dome. He had made his bones as a “mud larker” (a scavenger in river mud) back in Lincolnshire, England, but was better known these days for searching shipwrecks out of his home base in Florida. Drayton had not taken long to locate a heavy lead spike—he called it a nail—in the spoils from the swamp. He recognized it immediately as the type of nail that was used to hold down the deck planks of old ships; he said he had found a number of identical nails on Spanish galleons from the 1600s.
A decision was made to seek confirmation from an antiques appraiser. Dr. Lori Verderame, better known as Dr. Lori, was a familiar face on television from her appearances on the Discovery Channel’s Auction Kings and the Fox Business Network’s Strange Inheritance. After examining the spike-size nail, Verderame identified it as a wrought iron deck nail called a barrote, which in Spanish meant simply “iron bar.” She dated it to earlier than 1652, meaning it was made before the coin that had been found in the swamp at the end of the show’s first season. The barrote, the length of planking, along with the scuppers Fred Nolan had earlier pulled out of the swamp, all added support to Nolan’s theory that a Spanish galleon had been sunk where the swamp now lay.
Gary Drayton, though, was making finds on another part of the island that seemed to point away from Spain and toward the British. With Charles Barkhouse in tow, Drayton was using his metal detector to scan much of Oak Island’s lot 24, owned during the early 1800s by Samuel Ball. I noticed that when these scenes aired later in the year, there was no mention of the fact that there had been many metal detector searches of the island in previous years, most notably the exhaustive one conducted by Peter Beamish and his students from Phillips Academy. Knowing how picked over the island already was, I found it fairly impressive that Drayton was able to come up with what he at first thought was a coin, then decided must be a “dandy button” of the sort used on the cuffs of British military officers during the eighteenth century. Drayton also found a British coin on lot 24, one engraved with the name and likeness of King George II, which would have placed it in the mid-1700s, and a lead ingot like the one British soldiers had used for making musket balls in the same time frame. All of this suggested to Drayton that there had been a British military encampment on Oak Island at some point prior to 1795. Or, I thought to myself, all of it could have belonged to Samuel Ball himself, who after all had served with the British army during the Revolutionary War.
Still, there was something exhilarating about this accumulation of small discoveries and the giddy speculation that they could add up to more confirmation of Fred Nolan’s theory that the treasure of Havana had been secreted on Oak Island. I realized that beneath a veneer of detachment I was as susceptible to the wish to believe as any of the others involved with The Curse of Oak Island. Unlike them, though, I had to consider the possibility that the finds made by Drayton might support what everyone associated with the island regarded as their least favorite theory, the one that had been proposed by a woman from Sydney, Nova Scotia, named Joy Steele.
IT SOUNDED PLAUSIBLE when I first heard it described, and even in the brief introduction of it that I read in Joy Steele’s book, The Oak Island Mystery Solved. Steele described herself as a longtime member of various Oak Island forums who had been more or less obsessed with various theories associated with the place, until she got seriously ill and while convalescing realized that “Oak Island was the site of naval stores installation, part of a mercantilist scheme engineered between the British government and a company of English merchants in the early part of the 18th century.” By “stores,” Steele meant tar, raw turpentine, pitch, and rosin, all made by cooking down the crude gum oleoresin that comes out of pine trees. The Money Pit, Steele contended, “was none other than a ground kiln constructed to produce naval stores for use of either the British Admiralty and/or use by the South Sea Company in its triangular slave trade.”
Steele had done an extraordinary amount of research into the British naval stores industry in the Americas that thrived between 1713 and 1720, as a result of the Act for the Encouraging of the Importation of Naval Stores of 1705. Most of her book in fact was derived from various records and documents associated with the production and transport of naval stores by the South Sea Company at the behest of the Crown. There were detailed accounts of businesses created for the production of tar among Virginia’s Jamestown colonists and the Palatine Germans of New York. It made for tedious reading, but the curious thing was that absolutely none of it made any direct connection to Oak Island. That alone spoke a good deal about the weakness of Steele’s theory: the fact that both the British government and the South Sea Company kept such detailed records of their naval stores, and yet there was not a single mention of any such operation on Oak Island was a strong indication that there had been none.
What Steele had done, I realized, was to take a slender implied connection to the island and built her entire case on it. This was a letter written by a member of the British Parliament named Thomas Harley in 1720 in which, speaking of Nova Scotia as a possible source of naval stores, he stated, “They are likewise to have some pretty island in those parts, which is not yet peopled, and therefore more valuable.” Really, that was all she had, aside from the fact that also in 1720 Colonel Richard Phillips had sailed into Annapolis Royal with orders that vast tracts of forest in Nova Scotia should be set aside as Crown reserves. That order specifically cited that the white pine trees in those forests should be used for “masts and timber.” It probably wasn’t unreasonable to assume that some of those trees, or their stumps at least, might have been used to cook tar and turpentine, but Steele had no evidence of it. She did think it was quite important, though, that one of those tracts—one among dozens—was set along the LaHave River, which emptied into Mahone Bay. It might have been enough to establish a thesis, but it was far from the proof Steele implied when she wrote, “All evidence weighted, Oak Island strongly appears to be the island Thomas Harley talked about in his letter.”
Steele also tended to cherry-pick the written record—often including highly dubious sources to buttress her claim. She cited what Edward Rowe Snow had written in True Tales of Buried Treasure about “tales” of men silhouetted against fires on the island that had been seen in the early eighteenth century, whom she asserted were the operators of the “ground kiln.” Any reasonable person would have read Snow’s account as apocryphal. He cited not a single source, other than “tales” he claimed to have heard from people he didn’t identify. Worse was the enormous fuss Steele made over the fact that one of the pieces of wood that Robert Dunfield had pulled out of the Money Pit had been white pine. She seemed completely oblivious to the fact that nearly every treasure-hunting team attempting to get to the bottom of the Pit had built or rebuilt the cribbing reinforcing it. Almost certainly, the piece of pine was a fragment of that cribbing. Steele used the inconclusive Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution dye test as evidence that there was no flood system on the east-end drumlin, and echoed Captain Henry Bowdoin’s claim that the water was simply “percolating” not pouring into the Money Pit. I was certain there was no way she wouldn’t have known about the Money Pit dye tests conducted by Frederick Blair and Edwin Hamilton. It was possible that Steele didn’t know about the ice holes Dan Blankenship had spotted in 1979 and 1987, but it was impossible that she could be unaware of the various tests that had established water poured into the Money Pit at a rate of between four hundred and eight hundred gallons a minute. And Captain Henry Bowdoin’s false claims had clearly been a form of extortion or vengeance.
It took me longer than it should have to realize that what Steele had offered as the strongest pieces of evidence for her theory actually disproved it. It was a line at the end of her naval stores narrative that did it. The South Sea Company “bubble burst” in 1720, she had written, and “Oak Island and the naval stores produced there was but one casualty among many ruined and abandoned enterprises.” The one piece of evidence on which Steele’s thesis rested was that letter from Thomas Harley about “some pretty island” in Nova Scotia (which has literally thousands of pretty islands). The Harley letter, though, had been written in December 1720, just as the bubble, as Steele described it, was bursting. No more such facilities were set up in Nova Scotia after that date, at least not by the South Sea Company or its partners in the British navy.
The other “aha!” piece of evidence Steele had offered was a set of instructions for constructing a tar kiln used by Jonathan Bridger, surveyor general of His Majesty’s Woods in America, dated 1706. Those instructions stated that one should begin by digging a pit “eight feet deep, twenty foot wide at top, sloping towards bottom.” The Money Pit was more than 100 feet deep, which is to say at least twelve times as deep as Bridger’s instructions called for, and more deep than wide, which would have severely limited the supply of oxygen to feed the fire at the bottom.
Steele had, however, done considerable research, making a good case to defeat the claim that the Money Pit was a natural sinkhole, the favorite theory of the most determined Oak Island skeptics. And Steele had discovered some interesting documents related to the South Sea Company’s involvement in the slave trade, which included human trafficking in Nova Scotia. In Lunenburg, during the years when it was becoming a major shipbuilding center, most of the well-to-do in town had owned slaves, Steele found. While there was no actual evidence to support her claim that those slaves had been manufacturing naval stores on Oak Island, her research did support the possibility that slaves might have been involved in the excavation of the Money Pit and the construction of the artificial beach on Smith’s Cove. Steele had devoted a good deal of research to the inscribed stone. Like me, she had concluded after looking at all the evidence that the stone must have existed. But she had accepted without reservation that the inscription on the stone was the rows of symbols that had been translated to read: “Forty feet below, two million pounds lies buried.” Those 2 million pounds, Steele asserted, were the capital allotted to the naval stores operation on Oak Island, and the inscription was a sardonic epitaph on that operation, written for some reason in code.
Steele did help me find new information about the inscribed stone, however, in her mention of the long-out-of-print 1929 article “The Oak Island Treasure” by Charles Driscoll. Trying to find the Driscoll piece had led me to a research group headed by the Swedish Baconian Daniel Ronnstam that was attempting to locate the inscribed stone.
The Ronnstam group had obtained a bit more information about Jothan McCully, finding records of his birth on January 19, 1819, in Truro and his death on September 9, 1899, also in Truro, where he had fathered ten children and worked at a train station when he was not employed on Oak Island. Ronnstam was convinced by the story (told by Charles Driscoll and subsequently repeated by others) that McCully in the early 1860s had taken the inscribed stone to his own home after the Smith family sold the house where it had been part of the fireplace, and that it was from there that the stone had been moved to Creighton and Marshall in Halifax. Ronnstam also had accepted the description of the rock as 1 foot thick, roughly cut into a 2-foot square. He and his team were pursuing the theory that the stone was today part of the foundation of a home on the south shore. They’d had no luck in locating it.
During season two the production had undertaken a brief but quickly abandoned inquiry into the whereabouts of the stone that largely involved using Charles Barkhouse’s connections to Nova Scotia’s Masonic Grand Lodge, where the librarian agreed to scour the archives looking for information on Jothan McCully. The librarian reported back that there was no mention of the man, but he had found that a James Pitblado, whose profession had been listed as “drilling engineer,” had been a lodge officer at one point. But there was nothing further and no record of where the mysterious Pitblado and whatever he had plucked from that drill bit back in 1849 had gone. I suggested to the producers of The Curse of Oak Island that I could hook up with this group and join their search.
The producers told me they already had their own team searching for the inscribed stone and I was told they had produced the first real leads to what had happened to the stone after the closing of Creighton and Marshall in the 1930s. That wasn’t a complete exaggeration, although most would date the last recorded sighting of the stone to 1909, when Henry Bowdoin had seen it. The two principals of Blockhouse Investigations, Doug Crowell and Kel Hancock, had obtained permission to explore the building on Upper Water Street that had once housed the bookbindery. With Charles Barkhouse and Marty Lagina’s son Alex in tow, they had joined up with Dr. Allan Marble, the former president of the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society. After a search of the building’s basement, where the only really interesting thing they found was a boarded-up military tunnel, Dr. Marble revealed a recent conversation with the son of a former member of the nearby Halifax Club, who said his father had told him he believed a stone set into the floor of the club’s headquarters was the “90-foot stone” from Oak Island. The Halifax Club had been formed in 1862 and continued to operate as a hub of social activity among Halifax’s most prominent businessmen and women. It certainly seemed possible that some lore connected to the Oak Island stone might have been passed down through the decades. The group’s visit to the Halifax Club building, though, produced absolutely nothing. They not only found no one familiar with the story of the stone being built into the club’s floor, but they also discovered that the building was in the midst of a remodeling project. The construction supervisors had suggested looking in the basement, where a good many items had been removed for storage, but there was no sign of the stone.
What we all were certain of was that the stone still existed; crushing it would have been pointless and because it was so dense that job would have been a difficult one, anyway. Even if it was found, though, I doubted the stone would reveal much; Harry Marshall’s 1935 description of the inscription as worn away by the bookbindery’s leather workers rang true. The chances were infinitesimal that we were ever going to know for certain what the inscription on the stone had been. It was one more mystery of Oak Island that no one was likely to solve.
Accepting the fact that after more than two centuries of search and exploration there was still more about Oak Island we didn’t know than we did made it difficult to issue definitive statements about anything connected to the island. I was prepared to say, for instance, that I thought Joy Steele’s theory was extremely unlikely, but I wasn’t prepared to say that it absolutely was not true, and likewise with the inscription on the stone. In one of our conversations, Rick Lagina had characterized Steele as “one of those people who really need to believe they’re right, and can’t consider any other possibilities. For people like you and me, though, it’s impossible to rule anything out, until we know we have the answer. And the only way to get that is to bring up whatever’s down there.”