The Curse of Oak Island: The Story of the World's Longest Treasure Hunt by Randall Sullivan

Author:Randall Sullivan [Sullivan, Randall]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2018-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

“OF ALL THE THINGS FRED HAS DONE, nothing has ever infuriated or outraged me as much as his systematic removal and destruction of the markers and artifacts he’s found—a lot of which weren’t even on his property,” Dan Blankenship told me back in 2003. Nolan admitted nothing when I asked him about this. “I have recorded the precise location of every single marker or other significant object I’ve found on Oak Island,” Fred told me. “If I choose not to share that information with Dan, well, that’s my right.”

Nolan’s obstruction of the existing path to the Money Pit compelled Triton to build a new road around his property in 1970. Fred had also forced his adversaries to spend some serious money creating bypasses at the causeway entrance and to reach the east end of Oak Island from the west, but he lost nearly all of his leverage against Triton in the process. He had just two advantages left—the proximity of the southeastern border of his property to the Money Pit and, as of early 1971, his own treasure trove license from the province of Nova Scotia. When Nolan began a major excavation about 650 feet northwest of the Money Pit, Tobias and Blankenship realized how serious their island neighbor was about his search and about his theory that the treasure was in a tunnel that had been driven downhill from the Money Pit. The partners could not completely dismiss the possibility that what they were after might lie on Nolan’s property, not theirs. This was the basis for the negotiation of a new deal struck in late 1971. It guaranteed Triton at least 40 percent of any treasure found on Nolan’s land in exchange for giving Fred the right to drive to the island on the causeway, plus a promise that Triton would not challenge Nolan’s acquisition of his seven lots.

Triton had convinced Nolan that its operation on Oak Island was a formidable one. In summer 1970 the Alliance had built a 400-foot-long cofferdam around the perimeter of Smith’s Cove, 50 yards farther out to sea than the previous dams built by searchers. Blankenship had done much of the work (mostly with bulldozers) and supervised all of it. Triton’s was an impressive structure, but like previous dams, it would ultimately be battered, beaten down and broken by the Atlantic Ocean’s winter storms.

The construction of the cofferdam, though, had unearthed what might have been the most significant find of the twentieth century on Oak Island: a large U-shaped wooden structure buried beneath the sand and gravel just below the low tide line. It was made of logs 2 feet in diameter ranging in length from 30 to 65 feet, all of them notched at 4-foot intervals, each hand bored, and several still fitted with dowels that must have once secured cross pieces joining the logs. (Almost certainly this was the rest of what Gilbert Hedden had discovered when he spotted those two logs with hand-carved notches at Smith’s Cove back in 1938.

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