The island’s oaks, growing so close to the mainland, were an especially attractive feature to the settlers who in 1759 accepted pieces of the hundred-thousand-acre Shoreham Grant that brought hundreds of men and dozens of families to the south shore of Nova Scotia from New England. They were mostly English and Welsh, with names like Monro, Lynch, and Seacombe, and populated a village they called Chester Township. On the south end of the bay, a mostly German and Swiss population was in the process of creating the great seagoing and shipbuilding town of Lunenburg, famous for the Georgian mansions topped with five-sided dormers that were the homes of sea captains in that epoch of tall ships. The settlers in the Chester area, though, were mostly farmers, plus a few ambitious souls who prospered by building and operating lumber mills. Most of the trees on the other islands of Mahone Bay and on the mainland as well were evergreen softwoods—spruce and pine predominated—making the island a primary source of hardwood timber. That a single island among the dozens in Mahone Bay should be covered with oak trees was for a period of sixty years or so the principal mystery of the place. The first to describe the island in print and to remark on its impressive forest of oak trees was a French nobleman named Nicolas Denys, who had helped establish LaHave, the settlement at the entrance to Mahone Bay, in 1632. Denys could conceive of no explanation for how the oaks had gotten there.
AMONG THE POINTS DRIVEN HOME by a study of Oak Island is how much of what we call history is hearsay and supposition, conflation and apocrypha. Even revisionists go back to the earliest written sources, created by men who were putting to paper what they’d heard from people who were themselves often repeating stories they’d been told by someone else. Historians since the time of Herodotus and Thucydides have been deciding what version of events to include and what version to leave out; readers can only hope they’ve chosen wisely.
If one person is identified as the first to discover the works on the island, the name Daniel McGinnis is almost unanimously put forward. As the story is told, McGinnis was sixteen years old in the late spring of 1795 when he rowed to Oak Island one fine morning to explore it, all alone. It was still early in the day, the story goes, when the teenager stumbled upon an unusual saucer-shaped depression in the earth, about 13 feet in diameter, on the elevated ground of the island’s east drumlin. The forked limb of a giant oak extended over the clearing, cut off at a point where its two branches were still almost as thick as a man’s thigh. Attached to the limb, about 15 feet above the ground, was a weatherworn wooden tackle block that was held in place with a wooden peg or “treenail” of the type used in the construction of wooden ships. Taking all this in, young Mr. McGinnis surmised that he had happened upon the hiding place of a pirate treasure.
During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when buccaneers terrorized shipping lanes across the globe, Mahone Bay had been one of the world’s great pirate havens. Tales of buried treasure were endemic to the region, but the legends that surrounded Oak Island were particularly ominous. According to several of Nova Scotia’s numerous amateur historians, the citizens of nearby Chester Township had for years shared stories of “strange lights” that glowed on the island after dark. Author Edward Rowe Snow, who embraced this bit of apocrypha as historical fact, wrote that a number of fishermen claimed to have seen on the island human figures “silhouetted against bonfires,” as one local chronicler put it. Eventually, Snow had written, two men overcome with curiosity had ventured out to Oak Island to investigate. They never returned.
Daniel McGinnis did make it back to Chester, according to the story, where he recruited two young friends, also teenagers—John Smith and Anthony Vaughan—to help him dig for the treasure he was certain must have been buried at this mysterious spot on Oak Island. The first thing the three did was attempt to remove the tackle block hanging from the forked limb of the oak tree. But it slipped off the treenail and fell to the ground, where it shattered into powdery fragments, suggesting to the boys that it must be very old. They went to work on the ground then, armed with pickaxes and shovels. They had reached a depth of only 2 feet, though, when they hit a tier of carefully laid flagstones. (They would later decide after some investigation that the rocks were not from Oak Island but instead had been moved there from Gold River, about two miles north on the mainland.) Eagerly tossing the stones aside, McGinnis and his friends found themselves at the entrance to a large shaft. The sides were made of hard, packed clay, but the earth inside was loose and easy to shovel. Driven by the excitement of discovery, the three dug within a few days to a depth of 10 feet, where they struck solid wood. Assuming they had hit the top of a treasure chest, the teenagers shoveled feverishly, only to discover that what they had found was a level platform of oak logs, all about 6 to 8 inches in diameter, the ends of which had been embedded in the walls of the shaft. Removing these, the boys kept digging over the next few days, clearing out the loose soil with a pickaxe, two shovels, a rope, and a bucket. When they hit solid wood for a second time at 20 feet, the three again dug feverishly, convinced that his time they really had found the top of the treasure chest. What they had struck with their shovels, though, was another tier of oak logs, with their rotting ends embedded in the sides of the shaft exactly as the logs at 10 feet had been. At that point, the three looked up at the walls of clay towering above them and realized that even a partial collapse would bury them alive. It was agreed that they needed to mount a much more substantial operation, involving both a far larger workforce and more expensive materials and equipment if they were to go deeper into the shaft.
The three youngsters bought land on Oak Island, as the story goes, where they supported themselves as farmers while making regular trips to nearby towns, seeking out men of means who might help them recover what they were calling Captain Kidd’s treasure.
I HAD RETURNED TO NOVA SCOTIA determined to test every major theory and to question all received wisdom about Oak Island. After four weeks of research, assisted by, among others, the Nova Scotia Archives, the South Shore Genealogical Society, and local historian Charles Barkhouse, I was convinced that the tale was mostly true. This is not to say entirely true. There were a number of details in the narrative that I either doubted or was convinced couldn’t be right, and several others that I believed might be embellishments added as the story was told and retold.
For the moment, I was leaving aside the deeper mystery of who was behind the works on Oak Island and concentrating instead on the story of how those works had been discovered. Even then, the best answers I could find to my questions about who, what, and when were so unclear that nebulousness may have been their most defining feature. At least I didn’t have much doubt that the first to find the massive hole in the ground, now world-famous as the Money Pit, had been the young man Daniel McGinnis. While McGinnis himself was dead by the time the treasure hunt on Oak Island hit high gear in the mid-nineteenth century, his former partners, Vaughan and Smith, had been alive to describe what took place on the island in the early days—dating back to the discovery of the Money Pit—to those who produced the earliest written accounts. Both said there was no question Daniel was the first to spot the features that had inspired the three of them to start digging. Who Daniel McGinnis had been, though, was still a puzzle with a lot of missing pieces to me.
McGinnis was described as “an enigma” by R. V. Harris, the lawyer whose 1958 book The Oak Island Mystery had made the Money Pit story known outside Nova Scotia: “His age in 1795 is unknown. His origin and parentage is unknown.” So where had the story of the sixteen-year-old boy who discovered the Money Pit come from? From Anthony Vaughan, mostly, it seemed. Vaughan, an old man by the time his memories were recorded for posterity, had been a main source for the first published account of what had taken place on Oak Island, which appeared in the October 16, 1862, edition of the Liverpool Transcript, a now-defunct weekly newspaper that was distributed throughout southwestern Nova Scotia during the mid- and late nineteenth century. Vaughan had actually told his story at length more than twelve years earlier, in an 1849 interview with a devout Presbyterian named Robert Creelman, who was a member of a treasure-hunting group known as the Truro Company. The author who made use of the Creelman interview for the Transcript article was Jothan (sometimes called Jotham) B. McCully, who had been part of both the Truro Company and the Oak Island Association, separate treasure-hunting groups that had worked on Oak Island between