Treasure hunters have been drawn to a small island in Newfoundland, Canada, off the coast of Nova Scotia, for over 200 years.
Legends say that somewhere on the island, 30 metres below the surface, there are treasures hidden that could be linked to the infamous Scottish pirate Captain Kidd, jewels owned by Marie Antoinette, and the spoils of a French fort that was taken by the English during the Seven Years’ War.
Some even claim that the pit is the place where the Knights Templar buried the Holy Grail.
At least that’s what the legends say. One thing most of the lore have in common though, is that there is a curse associated with the treasures. Legend has it that the treasure will be found once seven men have died looking for it. To date six have perished, so we’re getting close…
Treasure hunting on the 56-hectare island, which lies in Mahone Bay, about 80 kilometres west of Halifax, began in 1795 when a teenaged Daniel McInnes is said to have noticed a depression in the ground near a site where some trees had been felled. Since the area had been a haven for pirates, he thought he might have struck gold. When he and two friends dug there, they turned up a shaft that supposedly went 30 metres deep and had wooden platforms every three metres.
One of McInness’s friends, Jack Smith, bought the lot and, along with Simeon Lynds of nearby Onslow, formed the Onslow Company to continue the chase in 1803. By the next year, they reported that at 25 metres deep, they found a flagstone with an encrypted message that, when decoded, read: “Forty feet below, two million pounds are buried.” The stone has never been seen since.
In 1849, Smith formed a new outfit, the Truro Company, to take up the baton, and tried various methods to collect samples from as deep as possible. But major setbacks came when the shaft flooded with water. Noting that the shaft filled along with the rising tide, Smith and his associates concluded that the shaft must be connected to Mahone Bay in a sophisticated booby trap. Other pits dug to try to circumvent the traps also collapsed.
The fatalities at the site began in about 1860 when a workman was scalded to death after a boiler ruptured. At about this time, the original pit also collapsed.
The Oak Island Treasure Company came next, drilling through the collapsed bottom of the original pit and even saw their drillbit return with flecks of gold and a fragment of sheepskin parchment with writing on it.
By the turn of the century, many more companies tried their hand at the excavations, including one that counted future president Franklin Roosevelt as a member.
In 1897, tragedy struck again when a rope escaped from the pulley that was lifting a worker from one of the pits and he fell to his death; it struck yet again in 1965 when four men died as a result of swamp gas or engine fumes.
The deaths had reached six, and a small army of dowsers, tarot card readers, clairvoyants, channelers, dream interpreters, and psychic archaeologists descended on the site, but by this time the area’s topography had been so disrupted by the various excavations that old maps were useless.
Even though the legend persisted, not everyone believed there was anything worth digging or dying, for.
Some point out that the treasure hunter who found the inscribed stone promising two million pounds of treasure was a member of the Onslow Company, and that the promise of such a treasure couldn’t have hurt the sale of stocks in the outfit. (It also seems convenient that the stone has since disappeared.) All those sophisticated booby traps and the tunnels that created them were likely also natural sinkholes, some geologists say.
Writing for Skeptical Inquirer in 2000, author Joe Nickell, known for his investigations into paranormal phenomena, outlined possible explanations for several aspects of the legend, and came up with an intriguing explanation: it may all be a legend with its origins in Freemasonry.
Buried treasure, he writes, is a major leitmotif in Masonic lore, and a few of the items that have been found on the island – a metal cross with a loop, a set square, and that inscribed stone – all appear repeatedly in Masonic imagery and literature. What’s more, he points out, various members of the companies that have excavated the spot are Freemasons, including Franklin Roosevelt.
Numerous fiction and nonfiction works, as well as a History Channel series on the people who currently own the plot, have been written about the Oak Island Money Pit.
The current owner’s business is even called Cerca Trova, Latin for “seek and you shall find.” Who knows, one more death and they may find what they’re looking for – whatever it is.