decreed that they should adjourn the expedition until the following spring, in hope that a better plan might be arrived at before then.
The Onslow Company did return to Oak Island in the spring of 1805 with a new strategy, developed by Colonel Archibald, for emptying the water from the Money Pit. Fourteen feet southeast of the Pit, they sank a shaft to a depth of 110 feet, planning to tunnel under the bottom of the original shaft and approach the treasure from below. When the diggers got within 2 feet of the original Pit, though, water began to ooze through the end of the tunnel. The bank of clay suddenly collapsed in front of them and water surged through. The men in the tunnel barely made it out alive, and within two hours the new shaft was also filled with water to the 65-foot level.
One more attempt was made at bailing, but the crew could not lower the water in the new shaft either. By then, the Onslow Company’s investors had spent themselves nearly into bankruptcy and surrendered their effort on Oak Island.
NEARLY HALF A CENTURY WOULD PASS before another serious effort was made to bring up whatever was at the bottom of the Money Pit. By then, the Onslow Company’s two most significant members were dead: Colonel Robert Archibald died in 1812 and Captain David Archibald went two years after that. McGinnis, Smith, and Vaughan lived on for some time after.
McGinnis built his family home on the opposite end of the island from the Money Pit, where generations of his descendants lived. Daniel’s grandson John McGinnis, for instance, was born on Oak Island in 1865 and remained there all his life. Smith, who took possession of the mysterious stone that the Onslow Company crew had pulled from deep in the Money Pit, built it into the backing of his fireplace, “strange characters outermost, so that visitors might see and admire it,” as Charles Driscoll wrote. Hundreds of people trooped through the modest Smith home to examine the curiosity over the next few decades. Vaughan returned to the mainland to work with his increasingly prosperous family.
The first of the three to die was the Money Pit’s original discoverer, who passed sometime in early 1827. The only exact dates known are the ones on which Daniel McGinnis’s will was dated, January 4, 1827, and the date it was probated, February 27, 1827. Anthony Vaughan was one of two executors and John Smith was a witness. So was a man whose role in the early discoveries made on Oak Island remains a mystery, one Samuel Ball.
I was startled to learn during my return visit to Oak Island, thirteen years after going there to research the Rolling Stone article, that in the first edition of History of the County of Lunenburg, the one published in 1870, Judge DesBrisay had identified the three who discovered the Money Pit as Daniel McGinnis, John Smith, and Samuel Ball. Ball was not replaced by Vaughan until the second edition of DesBrisay’s book was published in 1896. There was no explanation for the change offered. Ball was still in the book, described as one of the “early residents” on Oak Island, “a coloured man, who came from South Carolina where he had been a slave to a master whose name he adopted.” DesBrisay added only that Ball was remembered as “a good man.”
A bit more information than that was available. Samuel was born (probably in 1764) and grew up on a plantation in South Carolina. On November 14, 1775, fearing the revolutionary fever that was sweeping through the colonies, John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore and governor of Virginia, issued the Proclamation of Kemps Landing, in which he declared free men any black males who would join His Majesty’s forces in the battle against rebel forces. Based on this promise, Ball escaped the plantation shortly after the Revolutionary War broke out and joined the troops commanded by Lord Charles Cornwallis, but he was quickly transferred to the army marching on New York under the command of General Henry Clinton, then assigned to the command of a Major Ward and stationed at Bergen Point, New Jersey. At Bergen Point, Ball worked for the British army as “a woodcutter” until Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, then fled along with many of the other loyalist freemen to Canada.
Records show that Ball arrived in Shelburne in 1783 and remained there three years before moving to Chester. Based on an 1809 petition (called a memorial in those times) that Ball submitted to a justice of the peace named Thomas Thompson in Chester, we know that Ball had by then been living on Oak Island for twenty-three years. In his petition, Ball requested the allotment of land promised to black slaves who had joined the loyalist cause. Thomas stated Ball’s case in writing:
Your Memorialist Ball has no lands but, what he has purchased, never having got any from government, and there is a four-acre lott vacant, No. 32, on Oak Island, joining a lott purchased by your Memorialist. Your Memorialist therefore prays, Your Excellency well be pleased to grant, or otherwise order to have said Lott. Your Memorialist has but one son living. Chester, 9th September 1809.
This day the above named Samuel Ball came before me and made oath on the Holy Evangelist, that what is stated in the above memorial is strictly true, which I verily believe to be so.
I do hereby further certify that I have known said Samuel Ball, above twenty years, and I believe he is an honest, sober and industrious settler, worthy of encouragement.
Thos. Thompson, Jus’Peace.
The lot Ball requested was granted, and eventually he acquired others, gradually becoming the owner of nine four-acre lots on Oak Island, which made him for a time the landowner with the most real estate on the island. Ball had paid £8 for the first lot he purchased on Oak Island according to the deed dated September 22, 1787. This was a considerable sum at the time and evidence, as shown by the records in the Lunenburg County Book of Deeds, that acre for acre Oak Island was the most expensive land in Mahone Bay. How Ball was able to afford to purchase another seven lots in addition to the one he was awarded by the British Crown and also to acquire an additional hundred acres on the mainland and on Hook Island is something of a mystery. In various poll tax registries, Ball was listed as a farmer who raised cattle and sheep, also working as a logger and fisherman. Somehow, though, Ball and his wife, Catherine, were able to afford a servant named Isaac Butler who remained with them until Ball’s death on December 14, 1845, at the age of eighty-one. Ball’s will, probated on January 5, 1846, shows that his hundred acres on the mainland adjoined “lands owned by Daniel McGinnis.”
For more than a century and a half, there have been accusations that the young men who discovered the Money Pit (along with Samuel Ball, who was not so young but may have been part of that original discovery) did in fact find a treasure there, which explained their apparently “sudden prosperity” in the early nineteenth century. The story that the young men found three chests of treasure about 20 feet deep in the Money Pit and took one each surfaced in 2007. That year, a local historian named Danny Hennigar spoke to a woman descended from McGinnis who showed him a heavy cross of braided gold that was clearly hammered and hand formed, claiming she had inherited it as part of the treasure passed down through the generations from Daniel McGinnis. The cross, the woman said, had been examined by experts who said it was six hundred years old. That same woman, Joyce McGinnis, also showed up on the island in 2015 with her two sisters and repeated the tale of the three chests—which made for a dramatic story for the season three finale of The Curse of Oak Island. According to her, this cross was the one part of his treasure that Daniel McGinnis had held on to, insisting that it be handed down through the generations from oldest son to oldest son. Her brother had received it from her father, Joyce McGinnis said, but when he was about to die without a male heir, he had given it to her, making her promise to “never let this out of your sight.” Joyce McGinnis said she’d taken it to several jewelers who had told her “it could be as old as five hundred years.” In the summer of 2016, the producers of The Curse of Oak Island arranged for the cross to be examined by Dr. Lori Verderame, a former professor of art history at Penn State who had built a business identifying ancient artifacts. She reported that the cross was rose gold, between twenty-two and twenty-four carats in weight, and was of Spanish colonial design and manufacture, probably cast in a mold in either Mexico or Peru sometime between 1550 and 1700. The tiny holes in the cross had originally held emeralds, she said.
Others have focused their suspicion on
