It was inevitable that someone would suggest, eventually, the underground vault on Oak Island was a kind of bank where the most prosperous of the Acadians had deposited their wealth before being rounded up by the British in 1756. It made a good deal of sense, except that there were very few if any truly wealthy Acadians.
On the other hand, Nova Scotia had been home to many rich Huguenots in the eighteenth century. Most of the Huguenots (Protestants, as opposed to the mostly Catholic Acadians) who left France for the New World because of religious persecution in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were upper class. Many were members of the French nobility and nearly all of the others were part of what historians have called an affluent artisan class.
In 1685, when the Edict of Nantes (which since 1598 had protected French Protestants from persecution by the Catholics) was revoked by Louis XIV, fifty thousand Huguenot families fled the country. Nova Scotia was among their primary destinations.
The theory that linked the Huguenots to Oak Island, though, seems to be most solidly founded in an early twentieth century report by the historian (and William Kidd biographer) Dunbar Henrichs. In 1928, Henrichs was living on Mahone Bay in the town of Chester. It was there that Henrichs was visited by a Frenchman who had come to Nova Scotia to investigate a family legend involving a group of wealthy Huguenots (including one of his ancestors) who had escaped from France aboard two ships immediately after the Edict of Nantes was revoked. The family story was that the ships had sailed together from La Rochelle across the Atlantic to the island of Saint-Domingue (in what is now Haiti), where the engineer accompanying them had supervised the construction of a complex of underground vaults protected by flood tunnels. Some but not all of the families had deposited their wealth in these vaults, then boarded one of the ships, which sailed off to New York. The second ship, carrying passengers who still held their wealth onboard, had sailed farther north to Nova Scotia, making its way eventually to Mahone Bay, where the leaders of this group selected an uninhabited island on which the same engineer supervised construction of a second system of vaults, also protected by flood tunnels. These vaults could be accessed either by a secret tunnel from the surface of the island or by closing a gate that had been installed in the flood tunnel system, as the Frenchman told the story, Henrich said.
Henrich admitted he hadn’t taken the tale seriously until he heard that in 1947, nineteen years after his conversation with the mysterious Frenchman, a system of tunnels and vaults very similar to what had been described were found by an engineer named Albert Lochard in Haiti.
The Huguenot theory became quite a compelling one in his mind after that, Henrich said. There was one major problem with it, however. The Huguenots had not arrived in Nova Scotia in any numbers until after the Acadians were expelled in 1756, by which time the Mahone Bay area was populated by a good many New Englanders and Germans who had moved there on the promise of free land from the British government. It is doubtful that the Huguenots or anyone else could have created the works on Oak Island at that late date without people noticing.
The main objection to both the Acadian and the Huguenot theories of Oak Island, though, was the same one made in answer to those who suggested that whatever treasure had been buried in the Money Pit had long since been removed by the original depositors. If the people who placed the treasure there had returned for it, the reasoning went, they certainly wouldn’t have bothered to close the Money Pit up so neatly as it was found to be by McGinnis and the others back in 1795. “They would have just left the dirt piled up and hole open—why not?” as Marty Lagina put it to me in a conversation over our breakfasts one morning in August 2016. That the platforms inside the Pit were still intact and the massive hole in the ground still filled in with soil all the way to the surface, along with the fact that there was no obvious sign of any point of entry anywhere else on the island, proved in the minds of Oak Island’s treasure hunters that whatever had been buried down there remained. A young man who believed as much would incorporate the next company that conducted operations on Oak Island.
Frederick Leander Blair was a twenty-six-year-old insurance salesman working out of an office in Boston, Massachusetts, when he formed the Oak Island Treasure Company in 1893. Over the next fifty-eight years, as his interest grew into an obsession, Blair would not only become the driving force in the search for the treasure on the island, but he would also become the most relentless seeker in the search for answers as to how it got there and why. It is largely because of him that we know as much as we do about what happened during the first century after the discovery of the Money Pit, as the fascination with Oak Island crossed out of Canada to spread worldwide.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Frederick Blair was living and working in Massachusetts, but he had grown up in Nova Scotia: born in Thomson Station and reared in Amherst. He was a young child when he first heard stories of Oak Island, told by his uncle Isaac Blair, who had been part of the Oak Island Association and Halifax Company crews that had worked on the island during the 1860s. As Isaac Blair summed up his position in a letter to his nephew written in 1896: “I saw enough to convince me that there was treasure buried there and enough to convince me that they will never get it.” Frederick Blair agreed with his uncle that the treasure was there, but for more than a half century refused to accept that it could not be gotten.
What distinguished Blair right from the beginning was his commitment to research. He began by interviewing his uncle Isaac and Isaac’s friend Jefferson McDonald, from whom he had also heard tales of the treasure hunt on Oak Island as a boy. From those two, Blair moved on to the other men who had worked on Oak Island with the Truro Company and the Oak Island Association, focusing on those he considered most authoritative, among them James McNutt, Jothan McCully, Samuel Fraser, and Robert Creelman. Still working out of his office on Boston’s Liberty Square, Blair collected every available document, including the journals and letters that chronicled the labor, the discoveries, and the failures of those who had gone before him. Many if not most of those documents would have been lost if not for the fact that Blair maintained them in his personal archives. He sought out everyone still living who had heard firsthand the stories of the three discoverers, McGinnis, Smith, Vaughan, and of the Onslow Company’s leader, Dr. Lynds, and he made extensive notes of those interviews. Blair not only interviewed Adams A. Tupper, the former mining engineer for the Truro Company, but he also recruited him as a partner in his new Oak Island Treasure Company. Tupper, drawing extensively on his conversations with Anthony Vaughan during the middle of the nineteenth century, assisted Blair in writing the prospectus of the Oak Island Treasure Company, which began with a detailed account of the discovery and the attempted excavations of the Money Pit. Tupper also attached an affidavit in which he declared that he was “familiar with the various reports and traditions concerning the work done there before my own personal knowledge” and that his account of what he had been told was “to the best of my knowledge and belief, absolutely true.”
Blair also spoke to Anthony Graves’s daughter, Sophia Sellers, whose accidental discovery of what became known as the Cave-in Pit had been the biggest event on Oak Island in the years since the collapse of the Halifax Company. In the spring of 1878 she had been plowing with oxen about 350 feet from the Money Pit, Sellers told Blair, near what she knew was the supposed line of the famous flood tunnel. Suddenly one of the oxen disappeared into a “well-like” hole about 6 to 8 feet in diameter that had caved in under the animal’s weight. She and her husband, Henry, had needed help to pull the animal out of the hole, and after that they had simply filled it in with boulders and worked around the area. Blair, though, decided that investigating this new discovery should be among his new company’s first tasks.
“It is perfectly evident,” he explained in his prospectus, “that the great mistake thus far has been in attempting to ‘bail out’ the ocean through the various pits. The present company intends to use the best modern appliances for cutting off the flow of water through the tunnel at some point near the shore, before attempting to pump out the water.” This had been tried before, by both the Oak Island Association and the Halifax Company, as Blair certainly knew, but he apparently
