The Oak Island Mystery (10 page)

In 1933 Thomas M. Nixon from Victoria, British Columbia, founded the Canadian Oak Island Treasure Company. Nixon's theories were based on legends of lost Inca treasure, deposited under Oak Island by refugees from Peru who had fled from the Conquistadors. Nixon was also a convinced supporter of the decoy theory: a few minor pieces in the boxes at high level and a vast quantity in the depths. Had the necessary finances been available, Nixon had intended to sink interlocking steel piling in a great circle around the Money Pit. The public failed to take up more than a handful of the $225,000 worth of shares issued, so Nixon had to content himself with drilling a few experimental holes. He located seams of pink sand which were probably the result of the red dye experiments from the previous century; fragments of old oak below 100 feet; pieces of pottery below 120 feet; something which he described as an oak and cement bulkhead; and a cavity of more than thirty feet before encountering more ancient oak and solid matter at approximately 180 feet. All very intriguing, but equally inconclusive.

In November of 1934 Nixon gave up and left the island, leaving the way clear for the next contender: Gilbert D. Hedden.

Hedden was a much more formidable challenger for the unknown genius and his cunning defences. Having first become interested in Oak Island from reading an article in the
New York Times
(May 8, 1928), Hedden had spent seven years thinking how best to approach the engineering challenge which the Money Pit presented. In 1935, Hedden was a vigorous and highly intelligent thirty-eight year old with more than enough spare money for the Oak Island adventure, plus good engineering qualifications and years of management experience in the Hedden Iron Construction Company based in Hillside, New Jersey. He had also had good business experience in insurance and car dealing and had been elected Mayor of Chatham in 1934. Gilbert Hedden had the money, the engineering background, and the proven managerial experience.

He paid an extortionate price for the Sellers' land: $5,000. If the possibility of recovering the treasure is ignored, the rentable value of that land was less than $20 a year as pasture. That would have meant a return of 0.4 percent or less than a tenth of the totally safe interest available from U.S. treasury bonds in the 1930s, a period when the safety of their investments was paramount to most people. The possibility of locating treasure had inflated the price of the land tenfold.

Gilbert Hedden had one mental attitude in common with the Emperor Napoleon: he believed in hiring experts and then listening to good advice. In the days of Napoleon's early successes this worked exceptionally well. It was only when he forsook this policy that political and military disasters overtook him. Hedden went to Pennsylvania and hired Sprague and Henwood to get rid of the water and re-open the Money Pit.

Hedden had chosen well. Sprague and Henwood was a very good professional firm and their work proceeded with crisp efficiency and accuracy led by Frederick Krupp and Sylvester Carroll. They had a 1,000-gallon-a-minute pump which seemed more than a match for the flood water. Starting in the former Chappell shaft, they went down 170 feet: deeper than any of their predecessors had gone. They then took a new shaft (the Hedden shaft) down to approximately 125 feet. This was even wider in cross section than the big Chappell shaft to give plenty of room for the horizontal, exploratory drillings which it was proposed to make at two-foot intervals.

The Sprague and Henwood approach seemed to offer the best chance to date of recovering whatever the unknown genius had interred below Oak Island. Between ninety and 100 feet, the diggers hit clay or putty of the kind brought up in the previous century. They also drilled through many pieces of oak at about 150 feet: some were barely an inch thick, others had a girth of as much as six or seven feet. There was every indication that some of these were the remains of the chest and their supporting platform, which had collapsed in 1861 when Mitchell's men had attempted to get underneath them. Pieces of oak at this depth were a strong indication that the Sprague and Henwood drillers were very close to making a major find: perhaps even the treasure itself. Another intriguing discovery which encouraged Hedden and his team consisted of what appeared to be the remains of a very ancient ramp, jetty, or slipway (or perhaps even an ancient coffer dam) running from the artificial beach beyond the line of the coffer dams and out into the Atlantic. This jetty, or whatever it was, comprised massive old timbers with notches and bearing Roman numerals. Forty years later, Dan Blankenship and the Triton team were to discover just how extensive these old timber workings were.

Hedden had every intension of resuming work as soon as the winter ended, but it was not to be. He had already spent at least $50,000 before the end of 1937, but then financial disaster struck in the shape of huge tax demands connected with his profits from the sale of a steel business he had owned in 1931. Years of expensive litigation left Hedden perilously close to bankruptcy, but he maintained a rather wistful watch over the island until 1950.

Hedden's strange encounter with Harold Wilkins and the notorious “map of Skeleton Island,” attributed to Captain Kidd, form part of chapter 11, which looks into the various theories linking pirates and privateers with the Oak Island Mystery.

With Hedden prevented from further on-site explorations because of his financial difficulties, the way was clear for Professor Hamilton to take up the Oak Island challenge. He taught engineering at New York University in the 1930s and was ideally qualified to search for a solution to the problems posed by the Money Pit and the flood tunnels. As Hedden still owned the land, and Blair held the government treasure-hunting licence, the three men had to work out a deal under which Blair would receive 40 percent (instead of the 50 percent he had originally negotiated with Hedden), while his two partners would then be due for 30 percent apiece.

Hamilton rehired Sprague and Henwood, who now added recent first-hand experience of Oak Island drilling to their other considerable professional recommendations.

Throughout five summers, Professor Hamilton worked carefully and systematically on solving the Oak Island mystery. Employing over a dozen men and spending an estimated $60,000 between 1938 and 1943, he continued working despite the problems caused by the Second World War.

He drilled out sideways from the wide Hedden shaft but encountered nothing more revealing than pieces of old oak, which he concluded were either nineteenth century cribbing from the various tunnels, or from the disastrous collapse of 1861.

During the next few years, Hamilton explored many of the old shafts and workings from previous expeditions and made a number of interesting discoveries, but he failed to establish anything conclusive. One of his exploratory drillings penetrated limestone bedrock over 200 feet below the surface and brought up oak chips from that depth. He also repeated the dye experiments made in 1898. He and his colleague, Amos Nauss, went out in a boat and saw their dye coming up from the sea-bed three or four hundred feet off the south shore. At least one flood tunnel starting as far out as that must have connected with the Money Pit at a depth in excess of 150 feet.

Hamilton never returned to New York. He decided to stay in Nova Scotia, where he joined Nauss in a boat-building venture in Marriot's Cove, where he died in 1969.

Over the years, Oak Island has made more money for the lawyers than for the treasure hunters. After Professor Hamilton had given up and become a boat-builder, Hedden eventually sold his land to John Whitney Lewis, a New York engineer with almost forty years of experience. Lewis thought he'd obtained the essential government treasure licence along with the land, but Blair had renewed it for himself in 1950 to run for a further five years. The lawyers got involved when Lewis wouldn't allow Blair on his newly acquired land. However, it was legally possible in certain circumstances to obtain a Treasure Trove Act Special Licence which gave the holder permission to trespass in the course of his, or her, treasure hunting activities, provided always that no damage was done. If it was, the licence holder was legally bound to pay the landowner compensation. Lewis naturally contested this situation, but lost. Thoroughly unhappy about the whole venture by this time, he accepted Mel Chappell's offer for the land and retired from the Oak Island arena.

Early in 1951, Blair died and Chappell acquired the vital Treasure Trove Licence to go with his land purchase. The all-important Plot Eighteen and the government permit were now both in the same hands. But as with the earlier Chappell explorations, Fortune seemed to have turned her back. Just as the Middle Ages were infested by characters like Chaucer's Pardoner and various confidence tricksters pretending to have access to the Philosopher's Stone, so the twentieth century has been plagued by scam artists with mysterious “gold-finding” machines. Ironically, some of these “inventors” may have been sincere: in such cases they deluded themselves as well as their clients.

A weird-looking machine bulging with what appeared to be scientific circuitry was brought to Oak Island in December 1950. Its inventor told Mel Chappell that there was a large deposit of gold within twenty feet of the surface. He indicated an area only fifty yards from the original Money Pit. Chappell paid to have a huge steam-powered earth mover brought over to the island. Then he paid for a vast hole to be dug in the area the “gold-finder” had indicated. Nothing of any value came out. The machine indicated other locations, and Chappell paid to have drillings carried out in those areas. Nothing of any value was encountered. The work cost him nearly $40,000, but he had learnt a lot from the experience: principally, that any future investments in treasure hunting had to be made by someone else. In return he would issue a free lease, including the use of his government treasure hunting permit, on condition that he was to have 50 percent of any treasure recovered.

George Greene, a burly, cigar-chewing Texas oilman, did a deal with Chappell in 1955. As with so many other researchers, Greene had family connections with earlier Oak Island explorers. John W. Shields had been involved with Bowdoin's ill-fated work in 1909, and John was George Greene's uncle! Like any veteran oilman, George believed in exploratory drilling. He announced that it was his intention to drill all over the island looking for the mysterious “concrete vault” and its precious contents. He had more than one string to his bow: if he didn't find the treasure vault, he was off to drill for oil in South America. He also believed that Hollywood might be interested in filming the Oak Island story, and that he'd stand to gain from the film rights if they did. Greene had plenty of confidence, and there was almost unlimited Texan oil money behind him. His main finds were tantalizing wood fragments from various depths, and a vast cavern — so big that the 100,000 gallons of water he pumped down to try to ascertain its volume simply disappeared.

Greene's theory was that whatever was buried on the island had come originally from Spanish South American sources, and probably dated back to the sixteenth century.

The brawny Texan eventually left Oak Island to take on a new drilling contract in Louisiana, and his consortium's deal with Chappell ran out. The pressure of the Louisiana contract and some later work kept Greene away from the Money Pit. He never had the chance to return. He was murdered in British Guiana while taking part in geological work there in December of 1962. Nothing more than a tragic coincidence, perhaps: it was certainly dangerous and unstable country then — but there are those who would hint that he was yet another victim of the nebulous and sinister Oak Island “curse.”

When the Texan oilmens' contract with Chappell expired, the Harman brothers, William and Victor, from Ontario, took over. Like the unfortunate George Greene, they believed that the treasure was Spanish in origin, and that it had been plundered from South America in the sixteenth century. Their extensive deep drilling program produced oak fragments, coconut fibre, pieces of spruce, and “putty,” or ship's caulking clay. They were convinced that they were on the right track, but their money ran out, and another curious legal standoff arose. Chappell would not renew their lease unless they could convince him that they had enough funds to make a worthwhile attempt to recover the treasure. The Ontario Securities Commission prudently declined to allow them to set up a stock-selling public company to raise those necessary funds unless they had a minimum five-year lease on the treasure site. It was a classic “Catch-22” situation, and the Harmans were defeated by it.

The courageous and resilient Restall family were the next contenders. As a boy, co-author Lionel Fanthorpe watched a daredevil fairground motorcyclist named Terry Ward performing death-defying stunts inside a twenty-foot steel mesh sphere called the “Globe of Death.” The show was visiting Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk, England, at the time — the late forties or early fifties. There were several other members of Ward's stunt team, whose names are not now known. (Terry was clearly recalled because he signed autographs after the performance which Lionel watched!) It is possible that Mildred and Robert Restall were members of the team performing in Norfolk that day.