April 26, 2010 • 14 mins
In 1795, a farm boy named Daniel McGinnis found a strange depression in the ground on an island in Nova Scotia's Mahone Bay. As he and his friends began to dig, they realized they'd stumbled on much more than an ordinary hole. Tune in and learn more.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lammer and I'm Sarah Down and we're going
to start off this episode with a little personal anecdote.
(00:20):
When my family was in Hilton Had a couple of
years ago, I told my little little brothers that they
could each pick out a present to commemorate our trip,
and my brother, who was seven at the time, picked
out this bottle with a map inside, and then was
heartbroken to discover that it didn't really lead to a treasure.
But of course, because he's a kid and not jaded,
(00:41):
he decided it might be a real map, after all,
it was just in code. Unfortunately, the treasure hunting does
not end with children and grown men and women lose
their heads, sometimes literally, sometimes just go crazy over it.
And one possible treasure that has enchanted Pete for centuries
(01:01):
is the Oak Island money Pit, which is our subject
for today and what's in it, according to some people,
perhaps the Holy Grail. Others think it's Marie Antoinette's jewels,
or Sir Francis Drake's lute, perhaps Captain Kid's treasure or
inca gold, the original Shakespeare manuscripts, even the Secret of Atlantis,
(01:25):
so naturally it's booby trapped to write or is it
Sarah or is it So we're going to talk a
little bit about the discovery of the Oak Island money
pit that came in when a farm boy named Daniel
McGinness or McGuinness found something strange on an island in
Nova Scotia's Mahone Bay. And it was a place in
(01:49):
the ground that looked sunken, as if something had been
buried there perhaps, And above it there was a tree
with a tackle block or maybe a thought off branch,
depending on whose or you believe. And McGinnis wondered what
had been hidden away in this spot? Was it treasure?
And you know, we know people like black Beard dig
big holes and hide their treasure in it, so it's conceivable.
(02:13):
So he came back with some friends to try to
figure out exactly what was there, and armed with shovels,
they set to digging and digging, and then digging some more,
but the mystery only deepened. Much like the hole. They
dug down to a layer of stone, and at ten
(02:33):
feet they found this other layer of logs at ten
more feet another layer of logs, so they have no
idea what's going on, and as one can imagine, they
got tired when they went back. No one wanted to
come and help them excavate this pit, so they left
it alone. But of course the legend had begun to percolate,
(02:55):
and one of our famous themes, Mysterious Omens, reported sightings
of a black dog near the site start to pop
up after this, and um, when we're getting supernatural reports,
a legend is going to grow from that, right always.
So a man named Simeon Lynz became interested in this
(03:16):
spot in the next decade after hearing about it from
our three farm boy friends, and they formed a group
called the Onslow Company and started digging again. They made
it to ninety feet this time, and they found logs
every ten feet, clay, charcoal, a strange fiber that was
later discovered to be coconut fiber, which makes you wonder
(03:38):
where DiDia And they also found a stone tablet covered
in mysterious letters, which disappeared sometime in nineteen eighteen, nineteen
nineteen or nineteen twenty eight, depending on which account you follow,
and some thought it was ancient coptic script, while others
said it was just an inscription telling or the treasure was.
(04:01):
But they also strike a chest and they're so happy.
They figure, you know, we got it. Now this is
the money pit. That they quit for the day, which
infuriates me. I think they shod there. Has has to
me multiple times. Why did they leave? I mean, get
some lanterns and keep going if you found a chess. Anyways,
when they come back to the pit the next morning,
(04:23):
they find it full of sixty feet of water, So
way to go, guys. It's at sea level, and every
time they try to drain it, it just fills up again.
So they gave up, but came back after a time
with a trickier plan, and they said, Okay, we'll dig
another shaft that's parallel to the first one we started,
(04:43):
and then we will dig sideways to get to the treasure.
But that one filled up with water too, so they're
kind of out of ideas at this point and they quit.
But it's discovered that this water was a problem because
there were tunnels going from somewhere in the bay to
the pit, and it was theorized that when that cipher
stone was removed, some sort of airlock was broken and
(05:06):
the water rushed in. Perhaps it was a booby trap.
So forty years later, another group comes along determine this
time we're going to find the treasure. This is the
Truro Company, and they use that first shaft, which is
still full of water, and use an augur which is
kind of like a twisty screw to see what they
(05:28):
can pull out of the pit. They get clay wood
links of gold chain, which also disappeared later. Um, but
the water is still a problem. So these excavations go
on for years, and we also have our first casualty
death by ruptured boiler, which does not sound like a
good way to go. But okay, we've got shafts full
(05:51):
of water, all sorts of material in the ground, including gold,
and a death on our hands. So people figure out
this must add up to something, and it must be
something big. So enter another party, the Oak Island Association.
They too are trying to figure out how to get
around this water problem. Every time they dig it fills
up with water. But they do manage to tunnel to
(06:13):
what's now known as the money pit, the actual pit
where everything's supposed to be, and it collapsed, so again,
what kind of booby trap is this? Eventually we get
yet another company, the Oak Island Treasure Company. I think
this very direct name before it's like association and such
and such, a company digging for treasure on Oak Island.
(06:35):
And they find a tunnel five feet from Smith's cove
to the pit, and it has a drain made of
coconut fiber, which again, how did that get there? And
they also find some parchment and some kind of cement.
So these seems like clues. So they seem like possible clues.
What would Nancy Drew do? We also have our second death,
(06:58):
a worker who fell down a shaft. But the company
runs out of money and so their investigations end. But
don't think people stopped looking, because you know, when there's
golden question, they're not going to stabee Shakespeare's original manuscript
were Marie Antoinette's Jewels? A young Franklin Delano Roosevelt even
gets into the whole thing. And all of these people
(07:20):
dig and dig and dig until the island is basically
Swiss cheese. And in the meantime for more people die
who drowned, but they were poisoned first perhaps by swamp
gas and Then in the nineteen thirties, a man named
Gilbert Hedden thought that he'd found proof that this was
Captain Kidd's treasure buried in the island. And he thought
(07:41):
this because he had found a book with a map
in it, and the Kid's Treasure Island looked a lot
like Oak Island. Wow, how about that? That's what he thinks.
A lot of it matches up. But it turns out
that the guy who wrote the book had drawn the
map from memory. It wasn't the original map, and the
original map proved that there was no way that Captain
Kidd's Island was Oak Island. Filed again, foiled again. And
(08:05):
George the sixth had become interested in this the same time.
So we've got some famous names going on here. And
around the same time, there's also this story on the
island of a wealthy foreigner who explored the bay with
an ancient nap. He was very secretive, and one day
he disappeared. I like to think he might be a
ghostly ghostly specter. We like those. And this brings us
(08:28):
around to the nineteen sixties and a man named Dan
Blankenship who between nineteen sixty five and nineteen sixty nine,
spent an estimated nineties seven thousand dollars trying to excavate
this island. I think he's found a real money pick
of the law. Good ones, sir. He teamed up with
(08:49):
a guy named David Tobias and a bunch of investors
to form the Triton Alliance in nineteen sixty nine to
begin a ten million dollar dig. They figured it was
time to get the professionals involved with professional equipment, and
they're convinced that there could be billions of dollars worth
of treasure and you know, maybe some cool archaeological stuff too.
(09:10):
So they find cavities which are kind of like small
underground caves, and inside of them they find little shards
and bits of things would charcoal, cement, iron, brass, china, clay,
and interestingly, they do carbon dating on on these artifacts eventually,
and they're from different time periods. The wood is from
the fifteen hundreds, as is the cement, the metal is
(09:33):
from pre eighteen hundreds, Spanish scissors from the sixteen hundreds.
So something something strange exture of items. And in nineteen
seventy one they took a camera down to one of
these cavities underwater and they saw wood, a pick axe,
and what was possibly a human head or a human hand,
(09:56):
Although people who have seen the video some say, okay,
I mean it's pretty blurry, but yeah, you know, I
can see where there might be a hand, while others
say there's nothing to see at all, So we'll leave
that up to you. But nothing is easy with Oak
Island and the money pit, and so their problems, including
some very nasty and expensive land disputes because who wouldn't
(10:19):
want to own Oak Island? And then Blankenship and tobiases partnership,
they had a bit of a falling out, so that
fell apart. Blankenship offered tours for a while on the island,
and then they offered it up for sale, and it
looks like for a while Blankenship's new group was pursuing
a new treasure trove license, but I couldn't find updated information.
(10:41):
Oak Island has a site oak Island Treasure dot c
O dot UK, but I couldn't find anything that was
quite up to the present. So we're left with the
questions about what is the truth, what kind of treasure
might be there? Is there a treasure at all? Are
these you know booby traps or is it something else?
And Joe Nicol, writing for The Skeptical Inquirer, thinks that
(11:04):
the money pit is actually just a sinkle. Trees could
have fallen in and ships. Artifacts could have been sucked
into caverns under the island and the caves. You know,
maybe they're a natural event to due to the interaction
between limestone and water. And the flood tunnels could also
be a natural occurrence due to tidal pressure and other
(11:27):
physical aspects on the island. So maybe it's not you know, pirates,
booty or this great mystery. Maybe it's just science. Science
trumps again. Um, and what about that mysterious cipher. There's
also a cross found in the eighties, this heart shaped stone,
all sorts of weird little things, and Nicol says that
these and some other artifacts have something to do with
(11:51):
the Freemasons, that these things were either added sometime during
all this treasure hunting, or that the whole thing started
off with a Masonic chowl having to do with something
called the Secret Vault allegory that we won't get too
deep into. For what is perhaps a good final word,
a woman who was married to one of the four
(12:11):
drowned men. Another was her son told a reporter from
the Wall Street Journal Darcy O'Connor in n I knew
from the first day I stepped on that miserable island
that there was no treasure there. So Katie and I
are actually a little worried that we're going to become
obsessed with the money pit. Because that reporter we mentioned,
Darcy O'Connor, he goes on to write an entire book
(12:34):
about the island that's considered basically the definitive book on
the history of the island. And apparently there was a
recent CBC documentary about Oak Island and the money Pit,
which we haven't seen, but if you have, please email
us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com
because there are plenty of unanswered questions, as you've heard
(12:57):
in this podcast. We'd like to Harry think plenty of
Canadians senners he can maybe answer that me. Listen goes
and that brings us to our listener mail today, which
is real mail, our favorite kind. We got a postcard
from James and Qatar that's really lovely, all sorts of
boats and boat building on the front and a wonderful
(13:20):
stamp of a sure ear wig, and he said, I
heard you wanted postcards from around the world and thought,
I live in a strange place. Maybe you want to
postcard from the state of Qatar. I definitely do, He said,
I do a ton of traveling, and I've listened to
all of your podcasts, and he requested some history on
the Middle East. So we'll see what we can do, James.
If you want to send us other topic ideas, you
(13:42):
can find us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter
where it missed in history. And if you want to
learn a little bit more about pirates and maybe start
your own treasure hunt, you can search for how Pirates
Work on our homepage at www dot how stuff works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
(14:03):
visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to
check out this stuff you missed in History class blog
on the how stuff works dot com point page. Bo
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lammer and I'm Sarah Down and we're going
to start off this episode with a little personal anecdote.
(00:20):
When my family was in Hilton Had a couple of
years ago, I told my little little brothers that they
could each pick out a present to commemorate our trip,
and my brother, who was seven at the time, picked
out this bottle with a map inside, and then was
heartbroken to discover that it didn't really lead to a treasure.
But of course, because he's a kid and not jaded,
(00:41):
he decided it might be a real map, after all,
it was just in code. Unfortunately, the treasure hunting does
not end with children and grown men and women lose
their heads, sometimes literally, sometimes just go crazy over it.
And one possible treasure that has enchanted Pete for centuries
(01:01):
is the Oak Island money Pit, which is our subject
for today and what's in it, according to some people,
perhaps the Holy Grail. Others think it's Marie Antoinette's jewels,
or Sir Francis Drake's lute, perhaps Captain Kid's treasure or
inca gold, the original Shakespeare manuscripts, even the Secret of Atlantis,
(01:25):
so naturally it's booby trapped to write or is it
Sarah or is it So we're going to talk a
little bit about the discovery of the Oak Island money
pit that came in when a farm boy named Daniel
McGinness or McGuinness found something strange on an island in
Nova Scotia's Mahone Bay. And it was a place in
(01:49):
the ground that looked sunken, as if something had been
buried there perhaps, And above it there was a tree
with a tackle block or maybe a thought off branch,
depending on whose or you believe. And McGinnis wondered what
had been hidden away in this spot? Was it treasure?
And you know, we know people like black Beard dig
big holes and hide their treasure in it, so it's conceivable.
(02:13):
So he came back with some friends to try to
figure out exactly what was there, and armed with shovels,
they set to digging and digging, and then digging some more,
but the mystery only deepened. Much like the hole. They
dug down to a layer of stone, and at ten
(02:33):
feet they found this other layer of logs at ten
more feet another layer of logs, so they have no
idea what's going on, and as one can imagine, they
got tired when they went back. No one wanted to
come and help them excavate this pit, so they left
it alone. But of course the legend had begun to percolate,
(02:55):
and one of our famous themes, Mysterious Omens, reported sightings
of a black dog near the site start to pop
up after this, and um, when we're getting supernatural reports,
a legend is going to grow from that, right always.
So a man named Simeon Lynz became interested in this
(03:16):
spot in the next decade after hearing about it from
our three farm boy friends, and they formed a group
called the Onslow Company and started digging again. They made
it to ninety feet this time, and they found logs
every ten feet, clay, charcoal, a strange fiber that was
later discovered to be coconut fiber, which makes you wonder
(03:38):
where DiDia And they also found a stone tablet covered
in mysterious letters, which disappeared sometime in nineteen eighteen, nineteen
nineteen or nineteen twenty eight, depending on which account you follow,
and some thought it was ancient coptic script, while others
said it was just an inscription telling or the treasure was.
(04:01):
But they also strike a chest and they're so happy.
They figure, you know, we got it. Now this is
the money pit. That they quit for the day, which
infuriates me. I think they shod there. Has has to
me multiple times. Why did they leave? I mean, get
some lanterns and keep going if you found a chess. Anyways,
when they come back to the pit the next morning,
(04:23):
they find it full of sixty feet of water, So
way to go, guys. It's at sea level, and every
time they try to drain it, it just fills up again.
So they gave up, but came back after a time
with a trickier plan, and they said, Okay, we'll dig
another shaft that's parallel to the first one we started,
(04:43):
and then we will dig sideways to get to the treasure.
But that one filled up with water too, so they're
kind of out of ideas at this point and they quit.
But it's discovered that this water was a problem because
there were tunnels going from somewhere in the bay to
the pit, and it was theorized that when that cipher
stone was removed, some sort of airlock was broken and
(05:06):
the water rushed in. Perhaps it was a booby trap.
So forty years later, another group comes along determine this
time we're going to find the treasure. This is the
Truro Company, and they use that first shaft, which is
still full of water, and use an augur which is
kind of like a twisty screw to see what they
(05:28):
can pull out of the pit. They get clay wood
links of gold chain, which also disappeared later. Um, but
the water is still a problem. So these excavations go
on for years, and we also have our first casualty
death by ruptured boiler, which does not sound like a
good way to go. But okay, we've got shafts full
(05:51):
of water, all sorts of material in the ground, including gold,
and a death on our hands. So people figure out
this must add up to something, and it must be
something big. So enter another party, the Oak Island Association.
They too are trying to figure out how to get
around this water problem. Every time they dig it fills
up with water. But they do manage to tunnel to
(06:13):
what's now known as the money pit, the actual pit
where everything's supposed to be, and it collapsed, so again,
what kind of booby trap is this? Eventually we get
yet another company, the Oak Island Treasure Company. I think
this very direct name before it's like association and such
and such, a company digging for treasure on Oak Island.
(06:35):
And they find a tunnel five feet from Smith's cove
to the pit, and it has a drain made of
coconut fiber, which again, how did that get there? And
they also find some parchment and some kind of cement.
So these seems like clues. So they seem like possible clues.
What would Nancy Drew do? We also have our second death,
(06:58):
a worker who fell down a shaft. But the company
runs out of money and so their investigations end. But
don't think people stopped looking, because you know, when there's
golden question, they're not going to stabee Shakespeare's original manuscript
were Marie Antoinette's Jewels? A young Franklin Delano Roosevelt even
gets into the whole thing. And all of these people
(07:20):
dig and dig and dig until the island is basically
Swiss cheese. And in the meantime for more people die
who drowned, but they were poisoned first perhaps by swamp
gas and Then in the nineteen thirties, a man named
Gilbert Hedden thought that he'd found proof that this was
Captain Kidd's treasure buried in the island. And he thought
(07:41):
this because he had found a book with a map
in it, and the Kid's Treasure Island looked a lot
like Oak Island. Wow, how about that? That's what he thinks.
A lot of it matches up. But it turns out
that the guy who wrote the book had drawn the
map from memory. It wasn't the original map, and the
original map proved that there was no way that Captain
Kidd's Island was Oak Island. Filed again, foiled again. And
(08:05):
George the sixth had become interested in this the same time.
So we've got some famous names going on here. And
around the same time, there's also this story on the
island of a wealthy foreigner who explored the bay with
an ancient nap. He was very secretive, and one day
he disappeared. I like to think he might be a
ghostly ghostly specter. We like those. And this brings us
(08:28):
around to the nineteen sixties and a man named Dan
Blankenship who between nineteen sixty five and nineteen sixty nine,
spent an estimated nineties seven thousand dollars trying to excavate
this island. I think he's found a real money pick
of the law. Good ones, sir. He teamed up with
(08:49):
a guy named David Tobias and a bunch of investors
to form the Triton Alliance in nineteen sixty nine to
begin a ten million dollar dig. They figured it was
time to get the professionals involved with professional equipment, and
they're convinced that there could be billions of dollars worth
of treasure and you know, maybe some cool archaeological stuff too.
(09:10):
So they find cavities which are kind of like small
underground caves, and inside of them they find little shards
and bits of things would charcoal, cement, iron, brass, china, clay,
and interestingly, they do carbon dating on on these artifacts eventually,
and they're from different time periods. The wood is from
the fifteen hundreds, as is the cement, the metal is
(09:33):
from pre eighteen hundreds, Spanish scissors from the sixteen hundreds.
So something something strange exture of items. And in nineteen
seventy one they took a camera down to one of
these cavities underwater and they saw wood, a pick axe,
and what was possibly a human head or a human hand,
(09:56):
Although people who have seen the video some say, okay,
I mean it's pretty blurry, but yeah, you know, I
can see where there might be a hand, while others
say there's nothing to see at all, So we'll leave
that up to you. But nothing is easy with Oak
Island and the money pit, and so their problems, including
some very nasty and expensive land disputes because who wouldn't
(10:19):
want to own Oak Island? And then Blankenship and tobiases partnership,
they had a bit of a falling out, so that
fell apart. Blankenship offered tours for a while on the island,
and then they offered it up for sale, and it
looks like for a while Blankenship's new group was pursuing
a new treasure trove license, but I couldn't find updated information.
(10:41):
Oak Island has a site oak Island Treasure dot c
O dot UK, but I couldn't find anything that was
quite up to the present. So we're left with the
questions about what is the truth, what kind of treasure
might be there? Is there a treasure at all? Are
these you know booby traps or is it something else?
And Joe Nicol, writing for The Skeptical Inquirer, thinks that
(11:04):
the money pit is actually just a sinkle. Trees could
have fallen in and ships. Artifacts could have been sucked
into caverns under the island and the caves. You know,
maybe they're a natural event to due to the interaction
between limestone and water. And the flood tunnels could also
be a natural occurrence due to tidal pressure and other
(11:27):
physical aspects on the island. So maybe it's not you know, pirates,
booty or this great mystery. Maybe it's just science. Science
trumps again. Um, and what about that mysterious cipher. There's
also a cross found in the eighties, this heart shaped stone,
all sorts of weird little things, and Nicol says that
these and some other artifacts have something to do with
(11:51):
the Freemasons, that these things were either added sometime during
all this treasure hunting, or that the whole thing started
off with a Masonic chowl having to do with something
called the Secret Vault allegory that we won't get too
deep into. For what is perhaps a good final word,
a woman who was married to one of the four
(12:11):
drowned men. Another was her son told a reporter from
the Wall Street Journal Darcy O'Connor in n I knew
from the first day I stepped on that miserable island
that there was no treasure there. So Katie and I
are actually a little worried that we're going to become
obsessed with the money pit. Because that reporter we mentioned,
Darcy O'Connor, he goes on to write an entire book
(12:34):
about the island that's considered basically the definitive book on
the history of the island. And apparently there was a
recent CBC documentary about Oak Island and the money Pit,
which we haven't seen, but if you have, please email
us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com
because there are plenty of unanswered questions, as you've heard
(12:57):
in this podcast. We'd like to Harry think plenty of
Canadians senners he can maybe answer that me. Listen goes
and that brings us to our listener mail today, which
is real mail, our favorite kind. We got a postcard
from James and Qatar that's really lovely, all sorts of
boats and boat building on the front and a wonderful
(13:20):
stamp of a sure ear wig, and he said, I
heard you wanted postcards from around the world and thought,
I live in a strange place. Maybe you want to
postcard from the state of Qatar. I definitely do, He said,
I do a ton of traveling, and I've listened to
all of your podcasts, and he requested some history on
the Middle East. So we'll see what we can do, James.
If you want to send us other topic ideas, you
(13:42):
can find us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter
where it missed in history. And if you want to
learn a little bit more about pirates and maybe start
your own treasure hunt, you can search for how Pirates
Work on our homepage at www dot how stuff works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
(14:03):
visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to
check out this stuff you missed in History class blog
on the how stuff works dot com point page. Bo
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