I rejected (although, I must admit, not categorically) the idea that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan had found the treasure back in 1795, for pretty much the same reasons I scorned the theory that the story the three had told of the Money Pit had been a clever fraud. The fraud hypothesis was mainly the product of one Richard Joltes, a colleague of Joe Nickell’s at the Skeptical Inquirer. Joltes’s assertion is that Smith and Vaughan and, possibly, McGinnis (if he actually existed) had cooked the whole thing up as a for-profit scam. The main thing wrong with this argument is fairly obvious, though Joltes seems not to have noticed it. There were only two ways that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan could have made money from a manufactured story about treasure buried on Oak Island. One would have been to sell the property on which the Money Pit was located, and Smith—the actual owner of lot 18—not only made no effort to do this, but also refused all offers that came his way and held on to all of his Oak Island property until the end of his life. The other way in which Smith and his two friends could have profited from a fraud would have been to demand payment from those who wanted to search for treasure on Oak Island. It’s clear, though, that the deal the three made with the Onslow Company was to permit the excavation of the Money Pit in exchange for a percentage of whatever treasure was found. There’s not even a slight basis for doubt that all three of the Money Pit’s discoverers believed there was a treasure buried on Oak Island. McGinnis was so convinced—and so convincing about it—that he inspired the succeeding generations of his family not only to hold on to their Oak Island properties, but also to continue the treasure hunt, as both Daniel’s son and grandson did after he was gone.
That McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan believed there was a treasure buried in the Money Pit also mitigates strongly against the story that the three found the treasure back in the beginning. Why, if they had, would they have continued searching for the treasure years afterward? Joyce McGinnis would explain more than two hundred years later that her ancestor and his two friends had found only “a small treasure” and believed the greater treasure was deeper down in the Money Pit. This story had been told by others in previous decades, the claim being that those who originally dug the Money Pit used the three small chests of gold and silver found by McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan as a distraction to prevent searchers from probing deeper into the Pit and finding the “real treasure.” Some added that the three chests were only there to stop the wrong searchers from going deeper, so that only those worthy of a treasure much greater than gold and silver would eventually find it.
Curious notions both, I didn’t believe either. But I also wasn’t willing to completely dismiss them, because once I had confirmed to my satisfaction that the early descriptions of the Money Pit’s original discovery and of the Onslow Company’s search of the Pit were fundamentally accurate, I found myself convinced that the only explanation for such fantastic underground works on Oak Island was that something equally fantastic must have been buried down there.
That was the essential mystery of the place. But there were other smaller mysteries that seemed to demand attempted solutions, and Samuel Ball’s role was one of them. The only way I could conceive of approaching that particular problem was to try locating Ball’s descendants to see if perhaps they, like the descendants of Daniel McGinnis, had passed down a story through the generations. It turned out there had been a descendant of Samuel Ball (eight generations removed) named Frank Stanley Boyd who had posted some biographical notes and commentaries on the blog of an organization called We Stand on Guard, which had dedicated itself to “the elimination of Racism in Canada.” Boyd had died in Halifax in October 2010, however. I found his obituary, which led me eventually to his son, John-David Boyd, a plumbing contractor in Quispamsis, New Brunswick.
My first contact with John-David was promising. Two or three days after I left a message on the voice mail at his business, Boyd called me back and seemed intent on impressing me. He repeated at least twice that he was “the head of the family” and the only one in a position to speak for the descendants of Samuel Ball. John-David also told me that when his father was near death, Frank Stanley Boyd had summoned him to his bedside to tell “the rest of the story,” then had said, “don’t give it away.” I took this to mean John-David Boyd was looking to get paid for what he knew, if he knew anything. I could have been wrong about that, and I wasn’t going to pay a source anyway, so I asked Boyd for his email address, which he gave me. The next day I sent a description of my background and intentions, then received a brief but cordial reply from Boyd that he would look it over and get back to me. Days passed, so I sent a second email letting Boyd know that my time in Nova Scotia was growing short. He answered two days later that he was busy with “a project” and that my request was “not a priority” for him. When he did not reply to the email I sent a couple of weeks after returning home, I passed his contact information along to the producers at The Curse of Oak Island, who, unlike me, were prepared to pay Boyd for his time. They told me a month later that he had not replied to any of their emails or phone calls. I sent one more email myself and got no answer.
If there was any light to be shed on Samuel Ball’s role in the discovery of the Money Pit and the early days of the treasure hunt on Oak Island, it wasn’t going to be shined by me. My frustration was one more reminder, as if I needed any at this point, that Oak Island has long produced more questions than answers.
CHAPTER FOUR
What the Onslow Company’s investors had told family and friends about their experiences on Oak Island mostly has to be inferred from who joined the next excavation of the Money Pit. The Truro Company was formed in 1845, although it would not begin operations on Oak Island until four years later. This time there really was a “Dr. Lynds” among the investors (most likely Dr. David Barns Lynds, who lived and worked on Queen Street in Truro). Sheriff Thomas Harris was the only holdover from the Onslow Company’s investors to acquire stock in the new venture, but Anthony Vaughan, now sixty-seven, joined the Truro Company also. The most significant contributions to the Oak Island legend, though, may have been made by four other men: Jothan McCully, who was appointed director of operations and wrote the first newspaper articles about the events on Oak Island; Robert Creelman, who interviewed Vaughan and John Smith and passed their recollections on for posterity; Adams A. Tupper, who would leave the most detailed account of the Truro Company’s operations; and James Pitblado, another mining engineer who was appointed foreman of the crew that reopened the Money Pit in the summer of 1849 and would become one of the most mysterious figures in the annals of Oak Island.
John Smith had filled in both the Money Pit and the second hole dug 14 feet away by the Onslow Company, which has become known over the years as shaft no. 2. It was Anthony Vaughan, though, who helped the Truro team locate both shafts and then identified which was the Money Pit. The Truro crew had dug to a depth of only 6 feet in the Pit when they hit the top of the Mosher pump that had been abandoned by the Onslow Company back in 1804. Twelve days later, they had reached a depth of 86 feet, where some of the Onslow Company’s cribbing was intact.
The Colonist article (probably McCully’s) described what happened next:
When Saturday night arrived . . . all further work was postponed until Monday morning. Sabbath morning came and no sight of water, more than usual, appearing in the Pit, the men left for church at Chester village with lighter hearts. . . . At two o’clock they returned from church, and to their great surprise found water standing in the Pit to the depth of sixty feet. . . .
The next morning they set vigorously to work bailing, and had not been long engaged until the result appeared as unsatisfactory as taking soup with a fork.
For reasons that were not explained in either the Colonist or Transcript articles, McCully and Pitblado decided that they should proceed by probing the pit with a primitive drill called a pot auger, commonly used to prospect for coal. Curiosity with a whiff of desperation, along with a vague hope that they might bring up clues from below on the drill’s tip seems to have motivated the decision, though that is inference and no more. Under the direction of McCully and Pitblado, five holes were bored to the maximum