The Last Best Place (6 page)

L
ET’S ALLOW FOR A SECOND THAT MAYBE THE BIG THINKERS ARE RIGHT
. M
AYBE
myth expresses life far better than history, science or any of the provable things. Doesn’t matter at all if they are true, just that they are
your
myths, your fables. I hear “the stories,” which seem carried along by the very light and the breeze, and I know they have meaning. They are the subconsciousness of home sure as landscape is the atmosphere, history the collective memory. Deconstruct them and you’ll reach some kind of essential truth about Nova Scotia’s inner vision. But to do so is the death of fun—like searching for signs of racial alienation in an Oscar Peterson solo. Or seeking to glimpse the scars of an overbearing parent in a Wayne Gretzky end-to-end rush.

Some of the myths seem to have no real origin. It’s as though they existed before everything else. In the beginning, say the Mi’kmaqs, was Glooscap, their giant warrior hero whom the Great Spirit endowed with supernatural powers. At the dawn of civilization he lay on his back, head to the rising Sun, feet to the setting of the Sun, left hand to the south, right hand the north. After seventy times seven nights and days a bent old woman born that very day
came to him—the grandmother who owed her existence to the dew on the rock. The next day at noon a young man came to Glooscap. He owed his existence to the beautiful foam on the waters, and Glooscap called him My Sister’s Son. The following noon another person appeared—the mother of all Mi’kmaqs.

Before leaving for the Happy Hunting Grounds, Glooscap taught his people how to make canoes and he cleared rivers and streams for navigation. Once he was taking a bath in a trench dug out for him by Beaver. His friend Whale swam in and refused to leave until Glooscap walked to shore. Glooscap got up, and Whale swam away with such force that the great tides of the Bay of Fundy slosh back and forth to this day. Once Glooscap changed into a beaver, grew angry and slapped his tail on the waters of the Bay of Fundy five times with such force that five islands were created. Another time Beaver’s dam caused the waters to overflow into Glooscap’s garden. In anger, he hurled a stone but missed, instead cutting Digby Neck into the Bay of Fundy.

These are the timeless stories that concretize the spiritual, creative essentials of our world. But along with the real myths of the natives a new land like Nova Scotia is infused with the old-world mythology and folk beliefs that came with the settlers. The very name, Acadia, with the hopes and expectations that go along with it, harkens back to those origins. So does an abiding belief in fore-runners, ghost ships, monsters lurking in lakes and woods and cloven-foot devils, tales that can be traced to the harbours of England, the dales of Scotland and the villages of Germany. Stories
like these help the explainable harden into pure fact.

Yet there are also stories that linger because they remain forever mysteries. The
Mary Celeste
was a wonder of workmanship, one in a long line of hardy vessels that rolled into the ocean at Spencer’s Island, another tiny Nova Scotia community that produced fantastic sailing ships during the last half of the nineteenth century. Christened the
Amazon
when she was launched in 1861, the brigantine changed her name seven years later after a freak accident in a gale. Some Americans salvaged her, and on the morning of November 7, 1872,
Mary Celeste
left New York for Genoa, loaded with a cargo of coal, hay and liquor. Onboard was master mariner Benjamin Spooner Briggs, his wife, Sara, two-year-old daughter Sophia, and a small crew of seven.

On December 4 another brigantine, the
Dei Grata
, also Nova Scotia-built, was making her way to Gibraltar from New York. It had been a stormy crossing for the most part, and halfway between the Azores and Portugal the captain of the
Dei Grata
spotted sails on the horizon. It was the
Mary Celeste
. The seas were high but not dangerous. Three of the
Dei Grata
’s crewmen made it onboard. It was deserted. Two of the sails had blown away. Some of the rigging was gone. One of the lifeboats was missing but there was no sign that the tackle had been used to put it over the side. There was water in the hold, the binnacle was knocked over, the compass in the cabin smashed and the kitchen stove had been knocked out of place. Otherwise everything seemed orderly: gear stowed properly; plenty of still-warm food and water; the child’s toys and clothes scattered
around an unmade bed. The captain’s sword was still under his bed. But his sextant, chronometer, navigation books and ship’s papers were missing. The final entry in the ship’s log read, “Monday, November 25. At 8 Eastern Point bore S.S.W. 6 miles distant.”

It had sailed on for 378 miles with no one at the helm and no one aboard. Back ashore at least four men surfaced claiming to be survivors of the
Mary Celeste
, but knew none of the details of the voyage or the ship. Newspaper stories periodically speculated that it was all an elaborate murder plot; books postulated the whole thing was some kind of insurance scam. But no answers, just theories. So the story lives on, adding another layer to life here.

Just knowing about it colours your view of the world, particularly when you sit eating your lunch on a log on the beach at Spencer’s Island, looking at the pillars of an old wharf where the
Mary Celeste
was once tied. I get the same odd feeling whenever I look west across Mahone Bay, which is usually how I view the province’s best-known island. To reach it you have to head down Route 324 and drive through Gold River and Western Shore until you see a sign for the Oak Island Inn (“Cable television, tennis courts, murder-mystery weekends”). Cross the causeway, pass a few anchored fishing skiffs and the kids splashing in the water, drive through a wooden gate with a misspelled sign bearing a skull and crossbones and stop in the clearing. Last time I was there two military tents snapped in the wind along the waterline. Twenty yards away a couple of men struggled to raise a giant inflatable Keith’s Beer can.

I was excited. The first time anybody really got animated about Oak Island was in the summer of 1795, when a boy named Daniel McGinnis rowed out to it and walked about a mile through the woods to the eastern end. On the top of a small hill he found a tackle block hanging from the branches of an oak. Below the tree was a slight depression in the earth that looked as if it had been worked on some years earlier. In the late eighteenth century this part of the coast was well known as a pirate haunt. There was a persistent story of an old man who on his New England deathbed confessed to having been one of Captain Kidd’s crew and to helping bury “over two millions of money” beneath the soil of a secluded island east of Boston. So young Daniel raced home, got a couple of friends and some shovels and rowed back. Two feet down, the boys hit a layer of flagstones and under it found a 13-foot-wide shaft. Ten feet down, they found a layer of logs tightly pressed together. Ten feet deeper another log platform, and ten feet below it, another.

At this point, exhausted, they marked the spot, covered the pit with trees and brush and quit, determined to return. They never did, unable to find anyone willing or able to help with the dig. The story lived on, though. A few years later some local businessmen dug down through the pit and discovered charcoal and coconut fibre and more log platforms at ten-foot intervals. Beyond ninety feet they found a stone inscribed with hieroglyphics that, according to one translation, said, “Forty feet below, two million pounds are buried.” At 98 feet, they hit something hard, perhaps a treasure
chest. They came back in the morning to find the shaft full of sea water. When they tried to bail it out, the water kept coming in. Whoever had dug the shaft had also dug at least two tunnels that filled the pit with water when the inscribed capstone was removed.

The treasure hunters packed it in. Other groups took a whack at it, their drills bringing up links from a gold watch and tiny pieces of parchment—each new tantalizing hint touching off more speculation about the treasure’s origins. I particularly like the latest one: that it all has to do with the travels of Prince Henry Sinclair of the Orkney Islands back in the final days of the fourteenth century. Legend has it that after hearing about a strange but magnificent land teeming with fish and cannibals, he and a crew set sail for Newfoundland and what became the Maritime provinces. Sinclair was a supporter of the Knights Templar movement in Europe, to the point where he provided refuge in the Orkneys for Templars being persecuted on the continent by the ruling princes of Europe jealous of their wealth (the Templars were supposed to have become the custodians of the Holy Grail). There are those who think that Sinclair and his Templar friends may have buried the Grail in Nova Scotia—on Oak Island—which they intended to use as some kind of new refuge, a new Jerusalem. But there are also those who think that buried at the bottom of that impenetrable pit lies Marie Antoinette’s jewels, the secret stash of Sir Francis Drake, the long-lost manuscripts of Francis Bacon, the booty of Blackbeard or Morgan the Pirate.

Most Nova Scotians, on the other hand, still cling to the old theory that Capt. William Kidd buried his treasure there before the British hanged him in 1701.

“That’s bullshit,” barks Dan Blakenship, striding angrily from the small museum at the back of the lot. “All of Kidd’s whereabouts were known. It’s a theory that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.” Ruddy-faced, with wide shoulders and a big blackened blister on one of his cigar-like fingers, Blakenship is seventy-two but looks a decade younger. He knows a thing or two about theories. Thirty years before, he chucked a successful career as a general contractor in Florida after reading a
Reader’s Digest
article about the Oak Island hunt. If he harboured any doubts about his career change, they disappeared in 1971, when a television probe lowered down the shaft sent back pictures of what looked like a chest and tools. Watching the monitor of the closed-circuit camera, Blakenship believes he saw a severed human head float across the screen, as well as a preserved human body slumped on the chest. So he was already a believer when he became field manager for Triton Alliance, a consortium of Canadian and American investors fascinated with the Oak Island legend.

Today he is in a foul mood as he stands with some young underlings in a clearing near the entrance to the mine shaft. Two days from now everything has to be just so for the hundreds of visitors expected for the special bicentennial celebration of the Big Dig. The highlight of the event: the unveiling of a five-foot-high concrete stone to honour the six men who have died so far in the
hunt. But what really bothers him is the feeling that the whole thing—the twenty years and $140,000 of his own money spent pursuing his obsession—might be for nothing. We pile into a half-ton and make the short, bumpy drive back to the compound. Outside again, Blakenship squints into the sun, plants his feet, folds his arms and tells me the tale of his betrayal. How Triton, in which Blakenship is a minority shareholder, had refused his request for the $350,000 more he says he needs to solve the mystery. How instead they inked a deal with Oak Island Discoveries, owned by a Boston millionaire and an Emmy-winning film director, which wanted to conduct its extensive scientific research of the site.

“My partners seem to have a new theory every six months,” says Blakenship, who is on the move again, heading towards the tents erected to house the celebrations. “I’d rather tell you who it
could
have been. Whoever did it took many years to complete the job. We only know 10 per cent of what went on there. You have to look for someone with the time, the purpose and the drive. Who controlled religion at the time? The Knights Templar. They controlled all the wealth in Europe and the Mediterranean. They controlled all the shipping. They were looking for a new world. As far as possible you have to look at the evidence. Nolan”—a competing treasure hunter—“found a perfect symmetrical cross at the end of the island. I think there is something to it. I’m not saying it was the Knights Templar. But there’s a good possibility. I will say it has merit.”

The most merit of any of the theories? I ask.

“Well, that’s a strong statement,” he says, and pauses. I can hear the surf break, the wind jostling the tall oaks, just as it always has on the island. “I’ll just say it has merit.”

Stories like Oak Island live on because they are haunting and wonderful. But in Nova Scotia even the apocryphal-sounding yarns—the tall tales—have a faint ring of truth. What is one to make of the story about the Cape Breton mortician who opened his door one day and found a couple of boys off the fishing boats with a body they’d hauled from the ocean? None of them recognized the unfortunate’s face. So the undertaker reached the novel conclusion of pumping the cadaver full of embalming fluid, clothing it in a nice suit and propping the body up in the corner in the hope of jogging someone’s memory. Nobody recognized the body though, and after eleven months he gave up and buried the corpse. It was forgotten about until he received a call from a mortician in the United States who explained that the body was likely that of a sailor from Maine who had gone missing at sea. The remains were dug up and the casket stuck on a train, bound for a proper funeral. As an afterthought, and a rare moment of professional vanity, the undertaker from Cape Breton pinned to the body a note for his counterpart handling the wake at the other end. It read: “You can open it if you want.”

Now, true or not, I love that tale, which seems as perfectly formed, as funny, horrible and true as a Flannery O’Connor short story. Some, admittedly, are less original. Take this variation on the
old ashes-as-egg-timer joke, which involves a woman I know from Lunenburg County, a widow whose husband died early leaving her to raise three kids alone. When they were all grown and gone and she was well into middle age, she remarried, a doctor who had immigrated from Scotland and was renowned for his frugality. He died too. One day a visitor arrived to make sure she was coping with widowhood. (It helps here to imagine the local dialect, the extreme lilt and emphasis on unusual words and syllables that stretches and transforms the county’s name, for instance, into
Loon-an-bahg
, which always sounds to me like an accounting firm in a Monty Python routine.)