The Buried Treasure of Oak Island

The Mystery of a Well-Protected Buried Treasure

In 1795, a young man from Nova Scotia named Daniel McGinnis set out to find adventure on Oak Island, one of over 350 tiny islands in Mahone Bay. He did not dig up any buried treasure, but he did uncover a mystery that continues to haunt us today. Although Oak Island was uninhabited, people had been there, as shown by a weatherworn pulley hanging from the oak tree that gives Oak Island its name.

A depression in the ground under the tree made him think that a hole (later known as the Money Pit) had been dug there. Surely, that was enough evidence of a mystery to convince a young adventurer that Oak Island must be hiding a buried treasure.

The next day, he returned with two friends and dreams of sailing from Oak Island in a boat full of unburied treasure, the mystery solved.

They found a shaft, and a little over a yard down, a layer of flagstones. Further down, they found log beams, and other platforms, but no buried treasure. They raised what money they could to purchase better equipment, but Oak Island never gave up its mystery.

In 1803 a local doctor and some friends got wind of the mystery and got involved with work and funds. Ninety feet down, the soil of Oak Island grew wetter and wetter. Finally, they reached what they felt would be the last platform above the buried treasure.

They took off the next day, to celebrate breaking the mystery, and more importantly, to figure out how they would spend the buried treasure, once they removed it from the Money Pit of Oak Island. When they returned to work, the shaft was flooded to within thirty feet from the top.

Bailing and pumping did nothing to lower the water level in the Money Pit. So, after abandoning this attempt to find the buried treasure, they returned to Oak Island two years later and dug a shaft parallel to the original, planning to dig from the bottom of the new shaft to the buried treasure at the bottom of the first shaft. But the wall of earth between the two shafts collapsed, and the mystery of Oak Island remained unsolved.