Also by Randall Sullivan
The Price of Experience
LAbyrinth
The Miracle Detective
Untouchable
Dead Wrong
The Story of the World’s
Longest Treasure Hunt
RANDALL
SULLIVAN
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2018 by Randall Sullivan
The Curse of Oak Island, HISTORY, and the “H” design mark are trademarks of A&E Television Networks, LLC. All rights reserved.
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Printed in Canada
Published simultaneously in Canada
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: December 2018
First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: November 2020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-4827-8
eISBN 978-0-8021-8905-9
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
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To Gabriel and Grace, whose searches, I hope, will all lead to discoveries.
Introduction
Thirteen years ago, I began an article for Rolling Stone magazine with these lines:
Can what’s buried beneath the ground on Oak Island possibly be worth what the search for it has already cost? Six lives, scores of personal fortunes, piles of wrecked equipment, and tens of thousands of man-hours have been spent so far, and that’s not to mention the blown minds and broken spirits that lie in the wake of what is at once the world’s most famous and frustrating treasure hunt.
Still a pretty strong opening, I’d say, and the question remains a valid one. The article was published in the magazine’s January 22, 2004, edition, and every comment I heard about it was positive. I was not entirely satisfied with the piece, however, especially as time passed. I knew I’d left things out; magazine deadlines force one to work fast and the limited space in the pages of any periodical compels writers to make tough choices and sharp cuts—or to let editors make those choices and those cuts for them. It was the nagging thought that I’d accepted the semiofficial legend of Oak Island without sufficient examination, though, that truly bothered me.
In the summer of 2010, I was working as the host of a show being produced for the Oprah Winfrey Network. Early on, Joe Nickell of the Skeptical Inquirer, perhaps the best known naysayer in the country, was brought in to be my on-camera adversary. Nickell had written an article that attempted to debunk certain “myths” surrounding Oak Island, and when we spoke briefly about this off camera, I was acutely aware that I wasn’t confident enough in what I knew about the historical record to refute some of what he was saying. That troubled me.
It also troubled me that I might have given some preposterous theories about what had taken place on Oak Island more than their fair due, while dismissing as outlandish at least one hypothesis that I had come to believe deserved serious consideration.
Oak Island had long been a Rorschach test for dozens of historical loose ends and broken threads, most of the major conspiracy theories and a good many of the minor ones, and just about every tale of lost treasure out there. The island drew obsessive-compulsives, crackpots, and the sincerely curious to it like no place on Earth. None of this changed the fact, though, that Oak Island was a genuine enigma and quite arguably the most mysterious spot on the planet. I wanted another shot at the place.
I got one in the late spring of 2016 when I received a telephone call from the producers of the astonishingly successful cable television series The Curse of Oak Island, inviting me to spend a month or so on the island while the show was shooting its fourth season in Nova Scotia that summer.
It wasn’t getting back on television that I looked forward to as much as getting back on Oak Island. That tiny dot of land off the coast of Nova Scotia haunted my imagination like no other place I’ve been. That July I headed back there for the first time since the autumn of 2003. I didn’t delude myself into believing I was about to solve the mystery. All I aimed for was to tell the island’s story in a more comprehensive and entertaining way than any who had gone before me. But of course, I told myself, one never knew what one might find when one started looking.
CHAPTER ONE
Oak Island sits off the coast of Nova Scotia just north of the 45th parallel, the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole, about forty-five miles southwest of Halifax. It’s almost a mile long and not quite a half mile wide at its broadest point, narrowing to only a little more than a thousand feet at its sunken center, which is filled mostly with swamp and marsh. The island is commonly described as peanut shaped, but when I’ve looked at it from above I’ve always seen a baby elephant, mainly because of the curve of an incipient trunk that protrudes from its east end, wrapping around the southern shore of a compact, crescent-shaped bay that was once known as Smuggler’s Cove. Small hills of glacial drift, known geologically as drumlins, rise to about 35 feet above sea level on both ends of the island. The composition of the island’s two sides is very different: on the east layered with limestone, gypsum, and sandstone, on the west mainly quartzite and slate. Because the geologic structures of the island’s east and west ends are so dissimilar, and because the swamp divides them, some theorists think Oak Island was once two islands, very close together, that may or may not have been joined by the work of men.
While there are more than 350 other islands in the churning silver-gray waters of Mahone Bay, it’s not difficult to imagine why this one would have stood out to the mariners of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. It is larger than most of the other dots of land in those waters and very close to shore, barely two hundred yards from a protrusion of the mainland that’s been known for the past two and a half centuries as Crandall’s Point. What most impressed the first Europeans to live in the Mahone Bay area, though, was that the island was covered with a magnificent forest of mature oak trees, with deep roots and stout trunks that supported massive, spreading limbs, leaving most of the ground in the shadow of their canopy. It may have been the only island in Mahone Bay where oak trees grew, and certainly it was the only island covered with them. Those trees were what gave the island its eventual name, though it was designated simply as Island No. 28 by Charles Morris, the surveyor