northern reaches of the New World in 1497, when John Cabot landed on Cape Breton Island, now part of Nova Scotia. The French soon followed, though, with an eye to the establishment of settlements that defied British rule. The fort and town that Samuel de Champlain constructed at Port Royal on the Bay of Fundy was the first solid foothold the French made in what would become Nova Scotia. The British answered with a warning that they owned the entire province, as well as Newfoundland and New Brunswick, from the moment that Cabot planted the English flag at Cape Breton. Resulting wars large and small for control of the disputed territories were waged between the French and the British until deep into the eighteenth century.
The French, after losing what would be known as the War of the Spanish Succession and signing the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, surrendered all of their holdings on the Canadian mainland, retaining just four islands along the Atlantic coast: Prince Edward, Cape Breton, St. Pierre, and Miquelon. King Louis XIV and the great-grandson who in 1715 succeeded him, Louis XV, moved vigorously to protect what France had been left with. On Cape Breton, government engineers, private contractors, craftsmen, and French soldiers would labor for more than a quarter century to construct the immense fortifications that enclosed the fifty-acre settlement at Louisbourg. The costs were enormous and what were known as “Louisbourg pay ships” regularly delivered a fortune in gold and silver coins from the French treasury to pay for men and materials. Two of those pay ships disappeared en route to Cape Breton. No survivors ever surfaced to explain what had happened and the ships themselves have never been found. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it would begin to be whispered that to protect their wealth from an eventual British attack on Louisbourg, the French had hidden the gold and silver from those missing pay ships in an underground vault they had created in some remote part of Nova Scotia. Oak Island gradually became the favored location of those who spread this story.
A rival but related theory involving Louisbourg also emerged during this period, the story in this case being that a high-ranking French official had colluded with a corrupt contractor to funnel much of the gold and silver bound for Louisbourg into a secret hiding place, which again became Oak Island.
Neither theory was entirely implausible, but as I would find was the case with most of the possible answers to who was behind the works on Oak Island, the fact that they might possibly be true was the principal evidence that supported them. The same could be said of the third popular theory of who was responsible for works on Oak Island that began to spread in the late nineteenth century, this one involving the famous fleet of the Duc d’Anville. In 1746, a year after losing the fortress at Louisbourg to the British, France had assembled an armada of sixty-five ships carrying more than three thousand troops that set sail across the Atlantic to take back Louisbourg. The ocean crossing seemed damned from the beginning as storm after storm struck the fleet until the final and by far the most powerful tempest struck as the ships sailed past the “graveyard of the Atlantic,” Sable Island, about ten miles off the southern tip of the Nova Scotia mainland.
Just twenty miles long, one mile wide, and made mostly of sand, Sable Island has been described as “the fastest moving island in the world” because of the shifting plates beneath it. Combined with the rough waters and thick fogs that surround it, this has created treacherous conditions for passing ships and also for planes that fly too close to the island. Four hundred seventy-five shipwrecks have been recorded around Sable Island since the seventeenth century, and it is believed the true number might be at least twice that. How many of these were from the d’Anville fleet is not possible to know precisely, but certainly more than half of the French armada at least was lost in the Sable Island storm, while the rest of the ships were scattered and separated. Most of the fleet that remained made it eventually to what would become Halifax Harbour (it was called Chebucto Harbour at that time), where d’Anville himself and many of his men died of the diseases that had broken out on their ships during the ocean crossing.
The story that connected this doomed expedition to Oak Island was that one of the ships separated from the fleet off Sable Island was a pay ship that found its way into Mahone Bay, where the captain decided to create an underground vault to store his cargo of gold and silver until he was certain it could be transported safely. The pay ship then sailed off toward Chebucto Harbour, the story continued, but was wrecked by yet another storm along the way, and the treasure the crew had buried on Oak Island remained there. Again, the theory could not be entirely dismissed, but there was nothing truly evidentiary to support it. And when the records of the d’Anville fleet were reviewed, historians noted that there was no mention of any of the ships carrying a cargo of “specie or bullion.”
In retrospect, it seems rather remarkable that there was little mention, even in the early twentieth century, of an explanation for Oak Island rooted in the history of Nova Scotia that was far more credible. This theory involves the removal of the Acadians.
The Acadians had been French originally, back in 1605 when their first sixty families were settled by Champlain at Port Royal. Even as their numbers grew into the thousands, most of the Acadians remained on the Bay of Fundy, though a good number made their way to Mahone Bay, where they established small communities at LaHave and at what is today Lunenburg (called Merligueche back then). The Acadians gradually began separating from their French roots in an attempt to establish themselves as a unique population. This was a matter of sheer pragmatism, as it became increasingly clear that the Acadians’ best hope for survival lay in refusing to take sides in the long struggle between France and England for control of the land they called home. Theirs was an ethos of labor and thrift. The Acadians worked as farmers, tradesmen, artisans, and small business owners and thrived in Nova Scotia. They also controlled much of the smuggling trade in the province and were reputed to be the main suppliers of provisions to pirate ships.
After the Treaty of Utrecht was signed, the English demanded that the Acadians swear an oath of loyalty to the British Crown that included a promise to bear arms against the French if called upon to do so. The Acadians resisted so successfully that the British eventually inserted a clause in the oath that permitted them to remain neutral during military conflicts. The Acadians’ independent stance became impossible, however, after Edward Cornwallis was appointed the first governor of Nova Scotia in 1749 and created the city of Halifax to serve as his provincial capital. Governor Cornwallis (the uncle of Charles Cornwallis, who led the British armies against the Americans in the Revolutionary War) insisted that the Acadians’ oath of loyalty be reconsidered in light of changing circumstances. The French had retaken Louisbourg and the rest of Cape Breton, and Cornwallis saw the ten thousand Acadians living in Nova Scotia as a potential threat to British control of the mainland. If he evicted them from the province, Cornwallis reasoned, the Acadians would almost certainly resettle on Cape Breton, substantially increasing the French presence on Canada’s Atlantic coast. First the governor insisted that the Acadians retake the loyalty oath, this time without the clause that permitted them to remain militarily neutral. When the Acadians again refused to sign the oath, tensions with the British rapidly escalated beyond their ability to manage them. Still, most of them were caught off guard when, in 1856, Cornwallis ordered that the Acadians be rounded up at gunpoint, stripped of their land and possessions, then loaded aboard ships that would drop them off at ports spread along the American coast between Maine and Georgia. There was a rush among the Acadians to conceal their assets; they liquidated as much of their property as possible, then buried the coins in safe places.
When the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1763, the edict expelling the Acadians from Nova Scotia was revoked and a good many of them returned to the province. (Most of those who did not made their way to the bayous of Louisiana, where they became the Cajuns.) Few of the Acadians were permitted to reclaim their former homes in Nova Scotia, however, which made it difficult if not impossible to gain access to the places where they had cached their fortunes before the expulsion of 1756. What resulted during the nineteenth century was story after story of some lucky plowman or merchant of British or German or Swiss origin discovering a stash of Acadian coins in a cellar, a well, or a farm field. In 1879, for example, just ten miles south of Oak Island, the discovery by a farmer named William Moser of more than two hundred French écus and Spanish escudos while digging up the floor of his barn
