Oak Island Money Pit

The account

In the summer of 1795 a teenager named Daniel McGinnis rowed out to an empty island off Nova Scotia and found a saucer-shaped dip in the ground beneath an old oak, with a ship's tackle block still hanging from a sawn limb above it. He came back with friends and started to dig, and that was the beginning of the longest treasure hunt on earth.

Ten feet down they hit a floor of oak logs. Ten feet under that, another. The pit went on like that, platform after platform, with layers of charcoal and putty and coconut fibre that has no business in Canada. Somewhere past ninety feet a stone carved with strange symbols was lifted out, said to read forty feet below, two million pounds are buried. And then the sea came in. The shaft flooded to the tide line and would not be pumped dry, because someone, long ago, had cut flood tunnels from the beach at Smith's Cove to drown anyone who dug too deep.

Two and a quarter centuries later the island is still winning. Six men have died trying. Fortunes have gone down the hole that eats fortunes, and the digging has turned up a medieval lead cross, a scrap of old parchment, and timbers older than the dig itself. Pirate gold, a Templar vault, a queen's jewels, or a natural sinkhole that has fooled everyone for two hundred years.

Here is the part that will keep you up at night: nobody has ever reached the bottom. Two hundred and thirty years of shovels and drills and steel cofferdams, and the question is still open, still sitting there unfinished, waiting for someone stubborn enough or lucky enough to close it. It is down there, or it never was, and the only way to know which is to dig.

Known intelligence

• Discovered 1795 by a teenager, Daniel McGinnis, who found a circular depression and a ship's tackle block hanging from an old oak.
• Excavation hit oak platforms roughly every 10 feet; deeper down, flood tunnels fed from Smith's Cove repeatedly drowned the dig.
• An inscribed stone (now lost) was said to decode as "forty feet below, two million pounds are buried."
• Modern finds include a medieval-style lead cross, a scrap of parchment, coconut fibre foreign to Nova Scotia, and timbers carbon-dated to centuries before the dig.

Theories of the hunt

• Knights Templar treasure or a holy relic, ferried across the Atlantic.
• Pirate gold, Captain Kidd or Blackbeard.
• Marie Antoinette's jewels, hidden by a fleeing servant.
• Skeptics say it is a natural sinkhole and the platforms are just collapsed debris.

Leads, where the trail points now

• The Money Pit sits on the east end of the island; the original 1795 shaft and Dan Blankenship's later 10X borehole are the focal points, both repeatedly lost and re-dug as the ground collapsed.
• The flood tunnels are the real obstacle, running from Smith's Cove on the north shore to the pit. Finding and sealing the intake, the cove's so-called five-finger box drains found in the 1850s, is the prerequisite to any dry dig.
• The inscribed stone lifted from around 90 feet is the single most important missing artifact; it was last reported used as a hearthstone and then a bookbinder's beating stone in Halifax. Relocating it could be decisive.
• Modern dated finds point away from 1700s pirates: a lead cross of 13th to 15th century style from Smith's Cove, a sheepskin parchment fragment, and timbers carbon-dated before 1795.
• The prize may not be in the shaft at all. The swamp, the Smith's Cove drains, and the stone slipway are now rated as promising as the Money Pit itself.
• Treat the lower pit as a gas hazard. The 1965 Restall deaths were caused by hydrogen sulphide from the flooded shafts.
• Borehole 10X produced a disputed 1971 camera image read as a chest and a severed hand; its coordinates are documented and remain a target.

The trail, in order

• 1795: Daniel McGinnis finds the depression and tackle block under the old oak.
• c. 1803: the Onslow Company digs to about 90 feet and lifts the inscribed stone.
• 1850s: searchers learn the salt water is fed by tunnels from Smith's Cove.
• 1965: Robert Restall and three others die from gas in the pit.
• 2014: a televised search begins; the lead cross and other finds follow.

Sources and the record

• Oak Island mystery (Wikipedia)
• What Is the Oak Island Money Pit? (HISTORY)