Those who insist the trees on Oak Island were brought north in wooden ships and planted there make much of the fact that the recovered fragment of the McNutt manuscript asserted that the first thing Daniel McGinnis had noticed that caused him to stop and consider the Money Pit location was a circle of red clover growing in the spot, a variety of clover that was not native to Nova Scotia. This claim about the red clover and other nonnative plants growing around the Money Pit was repeated in T. M. Longstreth’s To Nova Scotia, published in 1935.
What most confused me about the nineteenth-century descriptions of the Money Pit’s discovery was the part about the tackle block. When I’d first heard the story of the old wooden pulley fixed to the oak tree branch that hung over the Money Pit, I’d reflexively dismissed it as apocrypha. If some group of people had gone to the massive effort of performing the extraordinary work on Oak Island for the purpose of concealing a treasure (for which, obviously, they planned to return at some later date), it did not make sense that they would have been so careless as to leave an obvious tell. And yet the story of the tackle block attached to the forked branch of the oak by a treenail had been repeated in every early account of the discovery of the Money Pit. I had a sense it must be true. But if it was true, this meant that whoever had dug the Money Pit in the first place had wanted it to be found. That seemed even more certain if one accepted as accurate an early account attributed to Anthony Vaughan that there were carved “marks and figures” on the trunk of the oak near its base.
WHAT MCGINNIS, SMITH, AND VAUGHAN DID after they gave up digging in the Money Pit by themselves is easier to know than what happened earlier, because the three young men were by then intent on involving others in their treasure hunt. First, though, they took precautions to protect their find. Before they went in search of a partner or partners who would help them mount a more extensive excavation, the three teenagers marked the depth their dig had reached, loosely refilled the bottom of the pit with dirt, surrounded it with oak sticks driven into the mud, then covered those over with branches from young trees they had felled.
They also searched the island. Their most significant find was what was left of an “old road” (which is Judge DesBrisay’s description; another writer called it a “rough path”) that led to the Money Pit site. In DesBrisay’s account, the three actually found the road before they started digging and that discovery seems to have been what convinced Smith and Vaughan that their friend McGinnis really had found something. Besides the road or path, the discovery that seems to have most excited the three was a large iron ringbolt they found at low tide on an eastern cove of the island, embedded in a rock. The three assumed it was where the ship had tied up while the pirates had buried their treasure. Though there is no clear record of when McGinnis purchased his property on Oak Island, it seems clear from the recollections of others that McGinnis, after marrying, built himself a house on the southwestern part of the island and farmed the land. Smith, already married and the owner of lot 18, built himself a house near the Money Pit and proceeded to acquire lots 16, 17, 19, and 20, giving him ownership of the entire twenty-four-acre eastern end of the island. Vaughan, by every account, lived on the mainland even after marrying. This is perhaps why, after an intervening period of seven or eight years, it was Vaughan who found the partner who would organize the first well-financed assault on the Money Pit.
The early accounts offer multiple explanations of why it took so long. Only those willing to work twelve-hour days could make a life on Mahone Bay during that time, and neither the young men nor their neighbors had the time, the energy, or the money to reopen the Money Pit and try digging deeper into it. Others have argued that people were afraid of Oak Island. Word that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan claimed to have found a spot where pirate treasure was buried had produced an oft-repeated local legend that the buccaneers killed a black slave and left his ghost to guard their treasure. There were also stories that a witches’ coven met on the island and cast curses on anyone who dared to visit. But the simplest (and therefore most likely) explanation was that the three young friends kept their mouths closed about what they had found and waited for an encounter with a person of means they believed could help them find the treasure.
In retrospect, what seems most remarkable is that McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan never seem to have wavered in their belief about who had buried that treasure.
CHAPTER TWO
From the perspective of what we know about the world today, it might seem absurd that the belief it was Captain Kidd’s treasure buried on Oak Island should persist for more than a hundred years. Even when the second edition of his History of the County of Lunenburg was published in 1896, Judge DesBrisay referred to the Money Pit as the burial place of “the Kidd Treasure.” From the point of view of the people living in Mahone Bay in the late eighteenth century, however, this notion was perfectly reasonable.
The coastlines of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland had been pirate havens all during the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth. In Nova Scotia, there was hardly a bay, cove, or inlet that did not have some legend of pirate treasure associated with it. And no part of Nova Scotia was more steeped in such lore than Mahone Bay. According to R. V. Harris, “the name ‘Mahone’ itself is derived from the French word mahonne which in turn is derived from the Turkish word mahone, which means a low-lying craft, propelled by long oars, called sweeps, and much used by pirates in the earlier days of the Mediterranean.” There’s some question about whether the bay’s name actually is an allusion to pirate boats, though most believe so. “Mahone Bay” first appeared on a chart of the Nova Scotia seacoast drawn by a Captain Thomas Durell in 1736, but Durell left no indication of where he got the name. It is clear, though, that pirates had been making use of the bay for more than a hundred years by then, and the reasons why it was so attractive to them are obvious. Twenty miles long by twelve miles wide, surrounded by thickly forested hills and protected from view by the Tancook Islands, Mahone Bay provides an ideal location to scan what are today the main shipping lanes running along the southern coast of Nova Scotia. And Oak Island might be the most protected body of land in the entire bay, with outer islands blocking sight of it until one sails very close to the mainland. A ship anchored on the south shore of Oak Island is about as well hidden from the open sea as it is possible to be and remain afloat, in a spot where it would take five minutes to row a boat to a mainland, which back in the seventeenth century was heavily populated with white-tailed deer, black bear, and moose, along with plenty of pheasant and grouse. The bay was then and remains today the summer home of hundreds of thousands of ducks and geese, not to mention the haddock, mackerel, and scallops that also fill its waters. During the warm season, it’s difficult to imagine a better place for a ship’s crew to fatten up, lay in provisions, and make repairs.
Henry Howard Brownell, in his 1861 work The English in America, observed not only that pirates had been “quite numerous all along the Atlantic coast of America” during the previous two centuries, but also that the freebooters made LaHave, at the entrance to Mahone Bay, “their depot.” In 1700, the French governor of Arcadia actually invited the pirates of Nova Scotia to make LaHave their base of operations, in order to keep the fort there out of British hands. The buccaneers happily obliged, mainly because the fort “was favorably situated for committing depredations on the trade with Massachusetts,” as Thomas Chandler Haliburton put it in volume 1 of his An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, published in 1829.
This sort of cozy relationship between pirates, government officials, and financial interests was common in the years between 1600 and 1750. Those who worked under the sponsorship of the British Crown were called privateers, and there were any number who alternated between collecting bounties for the ships they captured and simply seizing the loot and sailing off on the high seas. I found it remarkable that the greatest of all the privateers