The first time I ever spoke at any length with Rick, he told me that the only way he would continue with the show for another season “is if we find something significant this summer.” Only a day later, Marty ended a conversation with me about the endless stream of theories about Oak Island by saying: “The only thing that really matters is what we can find, see with our own eyes, and hold in our own hands.”
I wondered if Rick would feel they had hit the mark of “something significant” with the maravedi and the coin and button found by Gary Drayton. I doubted it. And I knew Marty would say that all they had actually seen or held that summer were more clues that pointed in multiple directions. The younger brother in particular seemed to need verification of claims from the past, a sense that the stories they had been told could be trusted. Marty even refused to accept without reservation what had been written for more than a century and a half about the drainage system connected to Smith’s Cove. He and Rick and the others had all agreed that a search for some remaining evidence of that system, something that hadn’t been torn apart by Dunfield and those who preceded him, should be one of the summer’s major projects.
They had begun with the same first step as so many others before them, the installation of a cofferdam that would block the tide from entering the cove and permit it to be drained. The Laginas and their partners, though, had access to equipment and technology that the members of the Onslow and Truro companies couldn’t have begun to imagine. In this case, that was an enormous system of inflatable rubber bladders that completely enclosed Smith’s Cove and gave the brothers 9,000 square feet below the high tide line that could be excavated and searched.
A good deal of the digging was by hand and Jack Begley did a lot of it, not only without complaint, but with genuine enthusiasm. Jack was dealing with a medical condition that had forced him to drop out of college and spend the entire winter and spring recuperating, so I was pleased that he was the one to find the first coconut fibers beneath the sand and clay on Smith’s Cove, and it was gratifying as well when Dan Henskee looked at the fibers and announced this was the place to dig deeper. Henskee was supervising the excavation at the cove, owing to his memory of the undisturbed drainage system from thirty years earlier. Henskee’s elevated role was also due to Rick Lagina’s faith in him, one more thing I liked about the older Lagina brother. During one of our conversations, Rick and I each described cringing at the way Dan Blankenship sometimes spoke to “the other Dan” as if he were a simpleminded servant. Henskee sometimes struggled to express himself, but Rick and I agreed that he knew Oak Island as well as anyone alive and maybe better.
The digging in the spot Henskee had selected gradually revealed stratified layers of soil that according to the consulting archeologist, Laird Niven, could only have been created by human beings. Niven also agreed with Henskee that the clay they were digging in was not native to the cove. When the shovels hit blackened wood, it was obvious the excavation had reached the remains of a wooden structure of some sort, most likely the one that Robert Restall had reported finding in his notes from 1964.
Eventually, at a depth of about 5 or 6 feet below the surface, the digging had begun to expose what looked like a rock wall. When he saw that the stones were also in layers, stones of one size above and of another size below, Rick, who had constructed a number of rock walls back in Michigan, said the rocks looked fitted to him. Laird Niven was brought in to take a look and agreed that the wall was man-made. Eventually it became clear that the stones were the sides and the bottom of a long trench. Dan Blankenship came to take a look and declared that it was a French drain. The atmosphere was jubilant. Finding “original work” was the aim of every search effort made on The Curse of Oak Island, and Rick announced that he was certain that this was original work. No one, including me, was going to argue with him.
During the work at Smith’s Cove, Robert Restall’s daughter Lee Lamb had made a return trip to Oak Island, presenting the “1704 stone” for inspection. “This is the Oak Island treasure,” Rick told her as he took the stone into his hands.
Rick’s sentimentality had proven to be a key ingredient of The Curse of Oak Island’s winning formula, in large part because he wasn’t faking his feelings. References to “Rick’s big heart” were a refrain among the members of the show’s crew, who all respected him immensely. Rick had told me himself that he believed the emotional connections being made among the people involved in the production and in the treasure hunt itself “might be the real purpose of all this.” Rick also treated every person who approached him with a theory of Oak Island, even the most agitated crackpots, with unfailing courtesy. He said that since no one really knew what Oak Island was about he felt an obligation to listen with an open mind to whatever ideas people brought him.
This was also, however, how Rick explained being open to what some would regard as fringe histories often featured on The Curse of Oak Island. There, he and I parted ways. I could see that Rick was a bit hurt and slightly offended by my rejection of the Templar theory. Within a couple of weeks of arriving in Nova Scotia I had given up arguing the case, but I truly had to bite my tongue when the La Formule cipher showed up.
THE SHEAF OF DOCUMENTS and the map of Nova Scotia and Oak Island that included the La Formule cipher had been presented to the Laginas by Doug Crowell of Blockhouse Investigations. Crowell and his partner, Kel Hancock, were amateur historians who had spent twenty years investigating the various loose ends associated with the Oak Island treasure hunt. Though often the object of their investigations was obscure stuff that ultimately went nowhere, some of it, especially what had been culled from long-dead Nova Scotia newspapers more than a century old and public records from remote municipalities, provided rich texture to what had been bare-bones tales and legends. But when Crowell presented the Laginas with the story of a lady in New York whose investigation had followed the Templars from Jerusalem to France to Scotland to the New World, I reacted with a skepticism that bordered on suspicion. The woman, Zena Halpern, described the papers in her possession, claiming an associate of hers had discovered them tucked into the back pocket of a book she had been given several years earlier.
These documents, Halpern said, were dated from 1178 to 1180 and described a Templar voyage to the northeast part of the North American continent, where their ship made landfall on “an island of oaks.” Then, “when I found the map, which is dated 1347, I began to put the pieces together,” Halpern explained to the Laginas. The mystery of the island, she revealed, was connected to African gold that had been under the protection of King David’s army commander Joab. How exactly the Templars had gotten hold of it, Halpern didn’t say.
Halpern was best known up to that point for her association with the Burrows Cave, a purported hole in the ground that a man named Russell Burrows claimed to have stumbled upon—or into—while taking a walk through the Illinois countryside one April day in 1982. I say “purported” because in the thirty-five years since Burrows’s alleged discovery, he hasn’t allowed other people to take a look at his cave, out of fear, he has insisted, that it would be ruined by looters if its exact location were ever known. What Burrows has done is present hundreds of the thousands of carved stones that he professed to have found in the cave to various archeologists and epigraphers (inscription scholars) including former Harvard zoology professor Barry Fell, whose studies of other stone artifacts have made him perhaps the most famous diffusionist in the United States, if often considered an outlier by his colleagues. Zena Halpern had herself become one of those who traffic in theories about the ways in which cultures all over the planet have been communicating and sharing since much further back in time than mainstream historians believe. Halpern was also among those who have embraced the claim that the Burrows Cave was filled with inscriptions written in Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek, Etruscan, and other ancient languages that were never spoken in North America. University-affiliated historians, on the other hand, including Barry Fell, have not only rejected but also openly derided Burrows’s claims. Fell publicly denounced the carved stones Burrows had given him as fakes and observed that one of them, the so-called elephant stele, had obviously been copied from his own book, America B.C. Halpern, though, had written extensively in defense of the Burrows Cave artifacts, publishing alleged translations of what some peer-reviewed scholars dismissed as gibberish.
What most excited the Laginas when they took a look at Halpern’s “1347 map” were the various notations written in French on it. The body of land depicted was, as Marty correctly stated, “clearly Oak Island.” Written alongside various markings on the map were identifiers that included: “The Basin,” “The Marsh,” “The Dam,” “The Anchor,” “The Valve,” and, most intriguing, “The Hatch.”
People had been searching for the “walk-in tunnel,” as R. V. Harris had described it, since the nineteenth century. Fred Nolan and Dan Blankenship had between the two of them stepped across just about every inch of ground on Oak Island without ever finding this entrance to the treasure chamber, but both men had continued to believe it existed. I also believed it likely existed, though I had a feeling it might now be underwater. For those who didn’t hold Zena Halpern’s involvement in the Burrows Cave theory against her, the possibility was tantalizing that the map could show them the way into the Oak Island treasure vault.
I have to admit my heart skipped a beat when Jack Begley pointed out that the location of the Hatch on Halpern’s 1347 map was on the west side of Oak Island near where the Blankenships lived, and then Dave Blankenship said he had stumbled into a “depression” in the ground right near there while out trailing a deer one day. Dave showed the others that depression, which Marty characterized as “a square hole chiseled into bedrock by humans,” because there was no geological explanation for it. Laird Niven was summoned and agreed with Marty that it was “strange” and “odd,” not a natural formation. Jack Begley probed the bottom and sides with a shovel, striking only rock under the soil, but suggested the wooden door to the Hatch might have rotted away. It was Jack who had made an overlay of the 1347 map on a current map of Oak Island and determined that the depression near the Blankenships’ homes was almost exactly where the 1347 map placed the Hatch. Despite what I suspected about the map, I was rooting for Jack and Rick as they dug and chiseled in the depression to see if it contained an opening that led someplace. It didn’t.
Kevin Knight, a professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, was contacted to test Halpern’s claims. Knight’s reputation as perhaps the leading authority in the world on “machine translation and decipherment,” as a Los Angeles Times article put it, had been cemented by what was widely viewed as a successful translation of the famous Copiale Cipher, a 105-page, 75,000-character cipher that the professor’s computer program had proved to be the work of a secret society from the 1730s called the High Enlightened Occultist Order. The producers of The Curse of Oak Island had given Knight the La Formule cipher provided by Zena Halpern, written on a Page that had been torn away at the edges, so that pieces of it were missing. When Knight reported back, he said his computer program had determined that French was the main language behind the cipher, which it had translated to read as follows (with some words missing at the ends or beginnings of lines):
Halt. Do not burrow/dig to
Forty foot with an angle of forty
five degree the shaft of five hundred
twenty two foot you enter the
corridor of one thousand sixty-five foot
reach the chamber
Knight’s critics said his computer program was capable of finding meaning where there was none. Still, I felt that speck of doubt inside me become a drop of wonder.
When the production made a quick pivot to follow the Templar trail from Zena Halpern to the village of New Ross in the rugged northeast corner of Lunenburg County, about twenty-two miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean on the banks of the Gold River, however, it was further than I could go. How the remains of a nineteenth-century blacksmith shop have been transformed into the ruins of the castle that Henry Sinclair/Glooskap built nearly five hundred years earlier is one of more bizarre skeins that runs through the Oak Island story. It goes back to the 1970s and a woman named Joan Harris who married delusions of grandeur to extreme gullibility and gave birth to the whole idea.
Not long after Joan Harris and her husband, Ron, bought their property on high ground just outside New Ross in 1972, the couple began to landscape their yard and discovered the relatively modest remains of stone walls along with artifacts that she decided were evidence that the property had been home to first a Viking castle with seven towers, and second a Scottish mansion with twelve marble pillars and a golden dome. Her most sensational find, Harris would maintain, was an iron implement that was described as the tip of an ancient Viking sword that had been made with a “blood channel.”
Eventually Joan Harris would author and self-publish A Castle in Nova Scotia, in which ghosts and aliens in UFOs are added to the story as guardians of a property where “Phoenicians, Celts, Mi’kmaqs, Norsemen and other Europeans” had lived and practiced various religions over the years. Harris, who claimed to regularly commune with the ghosts who haunted her property, said that some of them were members of a cult of phallic worship.
Before the book, Harris had written letters, dozens and dozens of them, many directed to Canada’s national Minister of Environment, who eventually dispatched an archeologist from Parks Canada, Charles Lindsay, to investigate. Lindsay visited the property, interviewed Harris, and examined the artifacts and other evidence on display. In his subsequent report to Parks Canada, Lindsay wrote that nothing he had been shown predated the nineteenth century, and that the walls of foundations of the supposed castle and mansion were mostly just linear piles of stones from field clearing, plus some rough stone foundations of modest outbuildings that had been constructed later. The supposed Viking sword was actually the blade of a scythe, Lindsay wrote, and probably dated to the twentieth century.
Lindsay had actually tried to be nice about it, at least publicly. Interviewed by a local newspaper called the Lighthouse, the archeologist diplomatically described Harris’s claims as “wild and wonderful,” but added that neither he nor the colleague who had accompanied him to the property, Birgitta Wallace, believed they “have any credibility at all.” Harris described Lindsay’s remarks as “offensive and derogatory,” and filed a lawsuit that was eventually thrown out of court. The uproar she created, however, attracted the attention of author Michael Bradley, who interviewed Joan Harris, then made use of her claims for his own purposes in Holy Grail across the Atlantic. Bradley not only made New Ross famous, but he also cast Joan Harris (whom he called Jeanne MacKay in his book) as the heroic victim of a vast government conspiracy to suppress what she had discovered. In spite of this, Harris came to despise Bradley, mainly because he had discarded most of her theories about the New Ross property in order to turn it into the place where Henry Sinclair had lived as Glooskap when he came to Nova Scotia in the late fourteenth century, as described in the Zeno narrative.
In the years since, various sane and earnest scholars had attempted to set the record straight, pointing out, for example, that the British documents that Judge Mather DesBrisay had relied on in History of Lunenburg County establish that New Ross had first been settled in 1816 by Captain William Ross and a company of 172 soldiers recently discharged from the Nova Scotia Fencibles regiment to clear the forest and prepare it for habitation. British surveys as far back as 1815 made no mention of any sign that nonnative people had ever lived there. Finally, historian Brian Culbertson had found an 1817 letter from the surveyor general of Nova Scotia, Charles Morris, suggesting that Captain Ross should find a suitable location for the blacksmith shop of a Mr. Daniel McKay. Culbertson then produced an 1860 survey map that showed a property allotted to McKay in the same location later occupied by the Harrises. What Joan Harris had found, obviously, was what was left of McKay’s old blacksmith works.
Harris never accepted that, nor did the tens of thousands who read Michael Bradley’s book as a work of history. When the Harrises left their New Ross property in 1990 it was swiftly purchased by Alva and Rose Pye, who had continued to perpetuate—for fun and profit, apparently—the majority of Joan Harris’s claims. Now a new couple, researcher and author Alessandra Nadudvari and her partner, Tim Loncarich, had purchased the property and were invited to discuss its “amazing story” on The Curse of Oak Island.
Nadudvari and Loncarich were an amiable pair who quite possibly believed their claims about New Ross. Nadudvari was convinced she had seen the Templar cross carved onto what Jean Harris had claimed was a “burial stone,” while Loncarich directed the group to the stone well that Harris had imagined was built centuries before it actually was. Loncarich called it the holy well, saying it was known to possess curative powers. The well was beautifully made, with four-foot-thick walls of fitted stones from the shores of the Gold River and a level flagstone floor. Tony Sampson was sent down first in a bosun’s chair rigged to a pulley that allowed him to rotate 360 degrees. He became excited by a rock that appeared to have a triangle carved on it, with what might be an eye in the center. Later, when he went down in a dive helmet and wet suit, Tony discovered a “broad arrow” carved onto another rock. His claim these were Masonic symbols could have been correct; the well was probably built by stonemasons, after all. But none of it meant that New Ross had been a Templar outpost.
Far more compelling to me than the visit to New Ross was the trip to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York. Doug Crowell’s friend Paul Troutman led the expedition and had combed through FDR’s personal letter collection, tedious and difficult work that had turned up at least a couple of items I was unaware of. One was a letter to Roosevelt from his former classmate Duncan Harris, who had joined him on those trips to Oak Island in the summer of 1909. The Harris letter didn’t say much, but it provided an opportunity for the show’s narrator to remind people that FDR had been a Mason and that “many” had suggested a Masonic/Knights Templar connection. The other thing Troutman turned up was a fact of which I had been completely unaware, which was that Henry Bowdoin’s notion that the crown jewels of France that were buried on Oak Island had come from FDR, who got them from his maternal grandfather, Warren Delano, a wealthy maritime trader who had invested in the Truro Company back in the middle of the nineteenth century. That nugget of new knowledge, though, did nothing to legitimate the story that the crown jewels had disappeared after Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting had been assigned to smuggle them out of France, nor that she had emigrated to Canada, as one account had it, and in the last years of her life told people the crown jewels were buried in Mahone Bay.
Weeks earlier, I had made a point of telling Marty Lagina that the story of the crown jewels being smuggled out of Paris by the servants of the king and queen had been thoroughly discredited long ago, that a mob had stolen them from the Royal Storehouse at the height of the revolution in 1792 and that afterward every single piece of the collection had been recovered, except for the Blue Diamond of Louis XIV, which almost certainly had been split in two to create the Hope Diamond. “Almost certainly” was not the same as “certainly,” Marty eventually got me to admit, and yes, it was true that there were credible people who disputed that the Hope Diamond had been cut from the Blue Diamond.
One more time, I reminded myself that I would accomplish more on Oak Island by listening than I would by sharing my opinions.