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The Real Daniel McGinnis of Oak Island
The story of how Daniel McGinnis found the Money Pit in 1795 is the founding legend of Oak Island...
Two Metal Rods and a Rotary Drill
Borehole 10-X sits about 180 feet northeast of the Money Pit, by the old Restall house. Dan Blankenship, the Florida contractor who came to Oak Island in 1965 and stayed for life, chose the spot by dowsing with two metal rods, as he stated in a sworn affidavit. David Tobias, the Montreal businessman behind Triton Alliance, later mocked "a worthless hole that he found by dowsing."
The first hole went down in November 1969 as a nine-inch rotary bore. Blankenship's reports record cavities at 140 to 143 and 165 to 169 feet, bedrock at 185, and a third cavity at 230 to 233 feet. Compressed air blew thin slivers of metal out from about 166 to 175 feet; they turned brittle within minutes. Stelco, the Steel Company of Canada, reported a primitive low-carbon steel, in all probability pre-1750.
Chain, Wire and What Dan Saw on the Screen
Triton widened the hole to 27 inches in 1970 and 1971; Parker Kennedy, a Halifax driller, carried it through bedrock to 235 feet. Wood came up at 167 feet, with chain links, wrought iron, wire, and chunks of a lime-based material that Canada Cement Lafarge judged likely to reflect human activity. Salt water carrying bird bones, shells and glass filled the hole, which Blankenship read as a flood-system link.
In August 1971 a television camera went down to the bottom cavity while Blankenship watched a monitor in a shack. He described three chests, a pickaxe, three logs, a body slumped against a wall, and a severed human hand floating before the lens. Crooker records the list and Tobias's verdict: "They could have been anything." Randall Sullivan, who saw the still photographs in 2003, wrote that the chests might have been chests and that he had to strain to see the body. The hand was never photographed.
Divers, a Collapse and Thirty Years of Concrete
Divers led by Phil Irwin, a Nova Scotia contractor, reached the cavity in 1971, a chamber about seven feet high so murky that they groped the floor and found loose stones. Blankenship dived it twice himself, the last time in 1972, and found rubble where the pumps ate at the walls.
In November 1976 (Sullivan gives the 26th, Steele and Fader the 25th) the casing folded while Blankenship hung at 145 feet; his son Dave winched him clear as the steel crushed at about 95 feet. Blankenship rebuilt the hole as an eight-foot shaft: railway tank cars to 126 feet by 1980, then, with Dan Henskee, his long-time helper, reinforced concrete to 167 feet by 1987 and bedrock by 1990. Crooker records that sonar found no tunnel to the bottom cavity, and Triton turned its money to the Money Pit.
Chatterton Stands on the Bottom
In Season 2 sonar operator Brian Abbott reported right angles, a rectangular object he called a chest, two wooden posts and a possible tunnel. In Season 3 John Chatterton, the wreck diver known for the Andrea Doria and the Britannic, squeezed past a drill bar at 204 feet and stood on the bottom. He found a metal drill pipe, not a wooden post; an angular rock where the chest had been; and sinkholes in the silt where a body had been imagined. He judged the chamber natural. In Season 4 Abbott rescanned and found the rock had moved, as Chatterton said; an airlift that season brought up hand-sawn wood coated in a tar-like substance and bone fragments.
What the Deepest Hole Leaves Open
The record supports this much: 10-X produced metal dated before 1750, with chain, wire and wood from the till above bedrock, and its bottom cavity is natural by the one direct inspection. It does not establish how those objects got 165 feet down in ground no searcher had touched. Joy Steele and Gordon Fader, the author and marine geologist who argue for an early industrial site, suggest a sinkhole trough ending near 10-X, waste from the Restall house, or water movement strong enough to crush a steel casing. Blankenship held that only a tunnel to the Money Pit could explain it. Two to three feet of silt on the chamber floor remain uncleared.
Sources
- William S. Crooker, Oak Island Gold
- Randall Sullivan, The Curse of Oak Island: The Story of the World's Longest Treasure Hunt
- Joy A. Steele and Gordon Fader, Oak Island Mystery Solved, 2nd ed. (2018)
- Dan Blankenship, periodic reports 1965 to 1994, compiled by Les MacPhie
- Golder Associates, Subsurface Investigation, The Oak Island Exploration (1971)
