percent of Oak Island, all of nearby Frog Island, and pieces of several other islands. How had that been possible, this faction of amateur investigators has demanded. They point to John Smith’s grandson Murdock Smith, who in the late nineteenth century donated the funds for the construction of the library at Port Williams, Nova Scotia, suggesting that he was using a portion of the “treasure” he had inherited to relieve his familial guilt. In fact, Murdock Smith was a successful dentist in Massachusetts and might very well have been able to pay for the library out of his own savings. As for the real estate holdings of John Smith, those could have been amassed by a combination of hard work, thrift, and shrewd investment.
The stories of the Vaughan family coming into “sudden wealth” around the end of the eighteenth century are both the most numerous and the most compelling. These stories seem to go back to two of Anthony Vaughan’s brothers, John and Daniel, who in the early 1800s became wealthy shipyard and mill owners in New Brunswick. The story that they got their start with a pile of gold coins received from their nephew Anthony Jr. might have something to do with the fact that, according to Families of the Western Shore, the Vaughans established their business in New Brunswick in 1796, within a year of the Money Pit’s putative discovery. Those tales of the Vaughans and the mysterious source of the family’s wealth have stayed alive for more than two centuries. In 1991, an eighty-one-year-old man named Carl Mosher who was living in the veterans’ unit of the Fishermen’s Memorial Hospital in Lunenburg, told one of those stories to a local reporter. Back in 1925, Mosher said, his grandmother Lucy Vaughan, a descendant of Anthony Vaughan, showed him “a wooden trunk containing about twenty-five white canvas bags of gold.” Not long after this, according to Mosher, Lucy’s brother Edward Vaughan “took the trunk and disappeared, leaving his property, business, wife and family.”
In August 2016, I spoke to a woman named Anna Frittenburg, the great-great-granddaughter of Ennis Joudrey, for whom one of the two major inlets on Oak Island, Joudrey’s Cove, was named. Her grandfather (Ennis Joudrey’s grandson) Harris Joudrey, who was born on Oak Island in 1889, had spoken often of the Vaughans and his suspicions about their wealth, Frittenburg told me.
He said there were four Vaughan brothers living in the area when he was growing up, and that they lived very well, even though they never seemed to work. They had this little schooner that they sailed to the States two or three times a year. My grandfather had been friends with one of the brothers when they were young. He said one time this boy got ill and my grandfather went to visit him. He said the boy was so happy to have a visitor that he sent him to a closet in his room and said, “Move that board.” When my grandfather did, behind the board, in between the wall studs, was a bag filled with gold coins. And the Vaughan boy told him, “You could take some.” My grandfather said he put the board back without taking any of the coins, but that he never forgot that day. He said that later when the Vaughan boy who had been his friend was grown up and was sailing off to Massachusetts or Rhode Island with his brother on their schooner, he became convinced they were making these trips in order to sell some of their gold.
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
