The world is full of mysteries. What, if anything, is hidden inside Area 51?
Why did MacDonalds choose a terrifying psycho clown as a mascot? And just what
the hell were they thinking when they made the final series of Game of Thrones?
The subject of today's video is an enigma so perplexing that people have been hard at
work trying to solve it for hundreds of years. Like all the best mysteries, it's a classic tale
of buried treasure and booby traps, but one that comes with an intriguing plot twist.
When it comes to finding hidden treasure, the hard part is usually figuring out
where to dig in the first place. But in this case, we know exactly where the treasure trove
is buried... the problem is, nobody can figure out how the hell to get it out of the ground.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people have tried over the years, including - randomly
enough - the likes of Franklin D Roosevelt, Errol Flynn, and John Wayne. A handful have even died
in the process. But to this day, the treasure continues to stubbornly refuse
to come out of the ground. As for why... well, that's going to take a bit of explaining. So,
make yourself comfortable, because this is the truly bizarre tale of the lost Treasure
of Oak Island - quite possibly the longest running active treasure hunt on earth.
Our story begins over 200 years ago in 1795 with a man named Daniel McGinnis, who was scouring a
little speck of land called Oak Island just off the Nova Scotian coast in search of a good spot
to build a farm. Whether or not he found a nice fertile patch of land on which to plant some crops
is unknown, but what he *did* find was an odd circular depression in the ground.
McGinnis had been brought up on stories of buried treasure,
and in perhaps the most famous of those tales, a notorious pirate by the name of Captain Kidd
was said to have buried 2 million pounds worth of loot on an island somewhere to the east of Boston.
Considering Oak Island's somewhere-to-the-east-of-Boston
location and the suspicious nature of the depression McGinnis had found,
he figured it was probably a good time to go get some shovels.
Returning the following day with a couple of friends, McGinnis began to dig. The ground was
surprisingly soft, but after about 3 metres the men struck something hard. Not a treasure chest,
but a plank of solid oak. It didn't seem like much of a find at first,
but as the men continued to dig, they came across another plank, then another. They also began to
notice evidence of old pick and shovel marks lining the walls of their fast-growing hole.
The implication was clear - McGinnis and his friends were excavating a deep pit that
persons unknown had dug - and filled in - long ago.
Oak Island is small and relatively remote,
and there was quite literally no reason whatsoever for anybody to dig
a really big hole there... unless they wanted to hide something valuable at the bottom of it.
The hunt for Captain Kidd’s lost treasure was well and truly on.
But McGinnis and his friends never got the chance to find out how many boats and hoes
you can buy for one buried treasure. Because after digging a good 10 metres or so straight
down - that's about the height of a 3 storey building - there was still
no sign of the loot. Without the time, tools, or manpower to dig any deeper,
the great big hole in the ground - which today is known as the Money Pit - was abandoned.
Not that it stayed that way for long. Word got out that pirate gold had been located on Oak Island,
and, soon enough, a trickle of treasure hunters that would one day become
a flood began to descend on the south coast of Nova Scotia.
In 1802, three years after Daniel McGinnis' initial discovery, a group of 30 men from a
nearby settlement called Onslow turned up armed to the teeth with shovels and pickaxes. The Onslow
Group soon sank the Money Pit significantly deeper into the ground than McGinnis and his friends had
managed, excavating all the way down to about 27 metres. They made a few interesting discoveries,
too. Just like McGinnis, they uncovered wooden platforms at regular 3 metre intervals,
but they also found a large stone inscribed with a cipher that would eventually be decoded to reveal
a tantalising message: *Ten feet below are two million pounds buried.*
But just when it seemed like Captain Kidd's treasure was about to be reclaimed,
disaster struck. Returning to the Money Pit one morning, the Onslow group found it swimming
in 18 metres of water. It was a weird development to say the least - there'd been no rain during the
night. And with the technology available at the time, the mine shaft that was apparently just
metres away from 2 million pounds worth of genuine buried treasure was essentially unusable.
Undeterred, the men from Onslow dug a parallel shaft next to the Money Pit
with the intention of coming at the treasure from the side. But by this point funding was running
out, and when the second shaft flooded too, the group were forced to give up and go home.
It was almost 50 years before a company from the town of Truro made the next serious attempt to
dig up Captain Kidd's treasure hoard. Arriving in 1849, the Truro company re-excavated both
pits that had been dug by the Onslow group, but once again the holes soon filled up with water.
And here's where things start to get a bit weird. Because the men of the Truro Company
noticed something the Onslow group hadn't - the water in the pits was slightly salty,
and it seemed to rise and fall with the tide. And that meant that the Money Pit - which
was located a good 40 metres from the nearest shoreline - was somehow flooding with seawater.
After conducting a quick search of the island's beaches, the group discovered the entrance to a
narrow channel that disappeared underground in the general direction of the Money Pit. Whenever
the tide was at its highest, the channel would fill with water, flooding the pit.
In other words - the treasure pit was booby trapped.
On the one hand that was incredibly bad news - the flood system was clearly a sophisticated
piece of engineering and overcoming its defences was going to be a huge challenge. But there was
a flipside to this particular coin - if Captain Kidd had gone to such lengths to prevent anyone
from reaching the bottom of his pit, he must have buried something of unimaginable value there.
The Truro treasure hunters did everything in their power to try and reach the trapped treasure.
They dug multiple shafts deep into the ground around the money pit, each of which came at the
presumed location of the loot from a different direction. But ultimately it was all in vain.
No matter where they dug, their excavations were plagued with flooding and unexpected collapses,
and eventually the Truro company were forced to abandon the island for good.
That was just over 170 years ago, and in the time since, innumerable treasure hunters have washed
up on the shores of Oak Island with designs on the riches at the bottom of the Money Pit.
Some have focused their efforts on trying to circumvent the flood tunnel booby traps,
others have tried digging shafts elsewhere on the island. At least 6 people have lost
their lives in the process - sparking faintly ridiculous rumours of a curse.
Treasure hunting technology has improved dramatically since Daniel McGinnis' day.
In the 1860s the first steam pumps arrived,
but they didn't have the power to keep up with the relentless incursion of floodwater.
In 1909, a company of treasure hunters called the Old Gold Salvage Group brought boring
equipment and divers to the Money Pit, but like those before them, they left Oak Island
empty handed. Randomly enough, an up and coming lawyer by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt
was among the members of the Old Gold Salvage Group. Despite the group's failure, it's said that
Roosevelt maintained an interest in the goings on on the island for the rest of his life and
had even planned a visit in 1939, but was forced to cancel when the Second World War broke out.
There have been far too many expeditions to Oak Island to list them all in this video,
but FDR wasn't the only household name to get himself tangled up in the mystery. Legendary
actors Errol Flynn and John Wayne both provided financial backing to various expeditions,
and it's rumoured that a pair of treasure hunters who arrived on Oak Island in the 1930s
were ordered to report their findings directly to the King of England, George VI.
These days, the hunt for treasure is led by brothers Rick and Marty Lagina,
who are documenting their efforts for a TV series on the History Channel.
The fact that the show is currently 9 series deep probably tells you all you need to know
about how well things are going. Admittedly the brothers *have* dug plenty of interesting
knick knacks up out of the ground - old coins, military paraphernalia, maritime trinkets,
even some jewellery - but as yet, they’ve failed to hit Captain Kidd's jackpot.
To be honest, at this point it's all starting to get a bit awkward.
And with every treasure-less year that passes, it's getting harder and harder to ignore a certain
nagging question - what if there was never any treasure on Oak Island in the first place?
Considering just how many people have spent their time and money searching
for Captain Kidd's treasure, it's easy to assume that we must know *for sure*
that there's something down there. But in reality, that isn't really the case.
For starters, the whole story is essentially nothing more than a
legend. Daniel McGinnis supposedly stumbled across the Money Pit
around 1795, but the first documented account of those events didn't show up until 1857,
and key details of the story differ depending on who you talk to and which sources you read.
There's also no evidence beyond word-of-mouth stories that
Captain Kidd ever buried any treasure on Oak Island in the first place. Even
more alarmingly, it turns out the whole idea that pirates routinely buried their treasure
is actually largely a myth - a plot device invented by the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson
as a framework around which to build swashbuckling piratey adventures. In fact, you might be
surprised to learn that almost everything you think you know about pirates is probably wrong.
The modern image of the stereotypical pirate has been hugely influenced by novels like Treasure
Island, where historical accuracy took a back seat in favour of an exciting plot.
For example, no pirate in history is ever known to have kept a parrot as a pet;
peg legs - though not unheard of - are thought to have been fairly rare among pirates;
and there's no evidence that walking the plank was ever a common piratey punishment.
Even the iconic pirate accent we all know and...
well hate - is completely false - pirates talk that way in every film you've ever seen
solely thanks to British actor Robert Newton, who played Long John Silver in Disney's 1950 version
of Treasure Island. Having grown up in Dorset in England, Newton had a thick West Country accent.
He made the most of it for the role, and the rest is history.
OK, so if pirates didn't actually bury their treasure in the first place, then presumably that
means the odds of their being pirate treasure on Oak Island are essentially zero, right?
Actually, not exactly. You see, it turns out that in all of recorded history there is precisely
one well-documented case of a pirate burying treasure. And it just so happens that the pirate
who did the burying on that occasion was none other than Captain William Kidd. Now admittedly
the treasure in question was buried a good 500 miles southwest of Oak Island on Gardiner Island,
and it was only actually in the ground for less than a year before it was dug
up and used as evidence against Kidd in the trial for which he was eventually hanged.
But still - the fact that Captain Kidd definitely *did* bury treasure *somewhere*
means we can't rule out the possibility that he might have done so on Oak Island, too.
But here's a question for you... *why?* Why on earth would he go to the trouble of digging a *30
metre* booby-trapped hole to put treasure in? If he wanted to keep some valuables safe for later,
wouldn’t a few metres have done the trick? These days we have JCBs and ground penetrating radar
and we still aren’t able to find the treasure, so there's no chance the technology of Kidd's day
would have been able to get to it. Meaning whatever he buried was basically gone
for good. And if that was his intention all along, why didn't he just chuck it into the
bottomless depths of the ocean and sail off into the sunset like the badass pirate he was?
In 1995, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution conducted a 2 week-long
scientific survey of Oak Island in an attempt to shed some light on the existence - or lack
thereof - of any buried treasure. What they found wasn't exactly encouraging.
Not only was there no evidence of any swag,
the team also concluded that the famous flooding of the Money Pit wasn't caused by an ingenious
200 year old booby trap at all, but by natural processes relating to the island's geology.
Speaking of geology, it turns out that the land not far from Oak Island on the Nova Scotian coast
is prone to the development of sinkholes with similar properties to those described
in the original Money Pit.
Now I know what you're thinking - what about those oak platforms and the cryptographic
stone that were found in the Money Pit - you certainly wouldn’t find anything like that
in a sinkhole. And that's a very good point. The trouble is, those key pieces of evidence
all seem to have inconveniently disappeared at least a hundred years ago,
and until someone tracks them down, they’re just another part of the Oak Island legend.
I mentioned earlier that there have been some interesting archaeological finds on Oak Island,
and that's absolutely true. But that certainly doesn't prove the existence of buried treasure.
If you dig enough holes anywhere where humans have lived for any length of time,
you're going to find an artefact or two sooner or later.
We've been leaving our crap lying around for millennia after all.
Combine all of this 'reasonable doubt' with the fact that dozens of expeditions over more
than 2 centuries have tried and failed to retrieve the treasure of Oak Island, and,
well, it just doesn't look great, does it. Don’t get me wrong - it’s certainly
possible that there's treasure down there. It's possible there's treasure pretty much everywhere.
But, if I were a betting man, I know where I’d be putting my money at this point.
That might seem like kind of a disappointing end to this strange tale, but in my book the
story’s actually all the more interesting if there *isn't* any treasure. I mean think about it - if
there never was buried treasure on Oak Island, then that means thousands of people - including
at least two Hollywood greats and a US president - have spent an unfathomable amount
of time and money digging holes in the mud on a random island in the middle of nowhere for...
basically no reason whatsoever. And if that’s the case then the Oak Island Mystery isn’t the
longest-running treasure hunt in the world - it’s the greatest wild goose chase in history.
Thanks for watching.