The Story of Oak Island's Mysterious Treasure
©Lee Paul

1992 aerial photo of Oak Island showing location of Money Pit at right

No search for hidden treasure can match the story of Oak Island's mysterious cache. It's a quest that has frustrated fortune seekers for nearly two centuries, yet the treasure's hiding place has always been well-known. Vast amounts of money have been poured into digging it out, and all have been lost, victims of the diabolically buried wealth. It has stymied local farmers and big conglomerates alike, claimed several lives over the years, and still refuses to surrender its fortune. Today, the search continues for the mysterious treasure in the infamous Money Pit.

Oak Island is a tiny outcropping of rock and trees located in the sheltered waters of Mahone Bay, a vast expanse of water off the east coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. As islands go, it is not much different than the hundreds of others dotting the Bay. For much of its life, it has remained uninhabited, but in the past few years beach houses, a museum, and a sprawling hotel have taken root. It's beginning to show signs of creeping civilization, except that the Bay is dotted with as many rocky islands as there are days in a year. Most of the islands are uninhabited, playgrounds for the area's residents, but a few are beginning to show the signs of creeping civilization with beach hotels, marinas, and sprawling resorts.

Vegetation on many of the islands is sparse, comprising only of sea grass and oats, wildflowers and the occasional piece of driftwood. Others possess a smattering of the northern varieties of pine trees, elm, and junipers. But Oak Island is different. It's covered with live oak trees, a variety of oak common to the warm delta areas of the southern United States and rarely found in the far north.

In the 1600s, the blue waters off Nova Scotia were a natural haven for pirate ships eluding British and Spanish pursuit. Many of these saltwater bandits originally got into the business as privateers (a privateer was a sailor paid by his government to attack only ships belonging to enemy nations in wartime), but the wealth gleaned in the pursuit of this practice often provided more temptation than even the most honest sailor could avoid. In fact, one of the most famous of all privateers was Britain's Sir Francis Drake. His ship, the Golden Hind, was well-known throughout the sea lanes of the world.

The privateers' rate of payment was usually a split of the cargoes which the captured vessels carried. It was a lucrative, glamorous lifestyle, but when wars ended, some of these privateers found it easier, or at least more profitable, to remain pirates. William Shakespeare is even reported to have said something about the "sanctimonious pirates that go to sea with the Ten Commandments, scraping out one of the table: THOU SHALT NOT STEAL."

These pirates hid their booty all up and down the eastern seaboard of North America. Many of them never lived to enjoy the spoils of their trade, and untold millions of dollars in booty still lies unclaimed in the most unlikely of places---sea pirates chose their hiding places well, usually preferring barrier islands and swamps in some of the most out-of-the-way places ever imagined to conceal their ill-gotten gains. Pirate captains would also use slaves to bury the spoils and then kill the slaves to protect the secret of the location.

Many researchers believe the brilliant buccaneer, Captain William Kidd chose Oak Island to conceal his booty. It was well-protected in the bay with a natural harbor on the ocean side, making it safe for his ship to come and go completely undetected from prying eyes on the mainland. The live oak trees of the island made it easily recognizable from the other islands in the immediate area, and since it was further north than Kidd usually sailed, pursuit was unlikely.

William Kidd was no ordinary man. He was born in 1645 in Scotland, totally enamored with the sea. It wasn't long before he was sailing the ocean blue back and forth to the New World Columbus had discovered only two centuries earlier. By all accounts, he was a respected merchant in New York, when King William III officially commissioned him to suppress piracy and confiscate pirate loot on the bounty main for the British crown. It was 1695 and over the next few years, Kidd's ship, Adventure, roamed the sea lanes and attacked ships of all nations, enemy or otherwise. The British really didn't care. As long as Kidd was careful never to attack any ship flying the British flag, they left him alone to do pretty well what he pleased. The British reasoned that any ship Kidd removed from the sea lanes was one less for them to worry about in the overall scheme of things.

As Kidd's legend grew, tales surfaced of his buried booty on lonely beaches from Massachusetts to Canada. Unfortunately, Captain Kidd never lived to return for most of his booty. He blundered into evidence that some leading members of the British establishment were in secret dealings with the French, even though England was at war with France at the time. Furthermore, the decision to outlaw him seems to stem mostly from the British suspicion that they were not getting a fair share of the captured pirate loot. Kidd was seized in New England, clapped in irons, shipped back to England, and after a rigged trial in London, found guilty of murder and piracy and hanged.

The location of much of Kidd's wealth went with him to the grave. Several families, however, found some of it. The most notable of the treasure hordes was found on Gardiner's Island in Long Island Sound, East Hampton, New York, after Captain Kidd's death. John Gardiner, a descendant of the original owner, Lionel Gardiner, is thought to have kept most of the booty, becoming a very wealthy man. It was the thought of instant wealth that fueled the treasure-hunting lust on Oak Island.

It was known that as early as 1720, strange lights resembling bonfires had been seen at night on the island. Several fishermen who rowed over to investigate, vanished without a trace. The appearance of the "spook lights" and the disappearance of their friends convinced everyone else to stay away. The island gained a reputation of being taboo, and for nearly a century, no one set foot on it.

Then on a warm spring morning in April of 1795, an eighteen-year-old youth named Daniel McGinnis decided to row out and cautiously explore the island. Being more fascinated than frightened by the specter of danger, he threw caution to the wind and marched inland. He knew that pirates had not been in the area for at least seven years, and he suspected that the roistering freebooters might have been the source of the spook lights that had so frightened his ancestors years earlier. He also suspected that if pirates had been on the island, they must have left a lot of evidence of their secret visits: pistols, knives, and maybe even a gold coin or two buried in the sand at the little beach where they must have gambled and fought and drank. The souvenirs, if found, would fetch a pretty penny or two, and Daniel could use the money.

McGinnis was not disappointed. He found unmistakable signs that the island had been inhabited, although not recently, and realized that his intuition had been right: the island had been a pirate stronghold. Perhaps, he reasoned, there was still treasure buried somewhere. He began searching in earnest. By early afternoon, he had found a small clearing containing a strange old oak tree with a ship's tackle block hanging from one of its lower limbs by a short length of rotted rope. The limb had been cut off about four feet from the trunk and was barren of bark. Underneath the limb was a curiously shaped depression in the earth, as if it had once been excavated and then refilled. He had no doubt that he was onto some ancient buccaneer's buried loot.

The next day, he convinced two close friends, twenty-year-old John Smith and thirteen-year-old Anthony Vaughan, to return with him to see the peculiarity he had discovered. They carried picks and shovels for digging. On that April morning, the island looked friendly and totally inviting.

Before going to the tree, Daniel took his friends on a tour of the island. On the southeast shore they found a half-buried boulder embedded with a heavy iron ring-bolt stout enough to anchor a ship in the bay. As they trudged inland, they discovered an overgrown road running the length of the island and leading to the small clearing containing the strangely festooned oak tree over the depression in the dark earth.

It was Tony Vaughn who examined the tree in detail. He alerted his friends to the worn place on the oak's strange branch, which they determined was about sixteen feet high and centered over the middle of the depression in the earth. They agreed that it looked very much like heavy ropes had been thrown over the limb, deeply scarring the wood, when something heavy had been hoisted on it. When they tried to retrieve the ship's tackle block, however, it fell into pieces.

They went to work with their picks and shovels, planning to have the treasure up and be home by lunch. But they never counted on the devilishly clever method of burial the original diggers had used. The boys were in a thirteen-foot-wide shaft, four feet deep, when they encountered their first problem: flagstones set in a circular pattern and made of rock not found on the island. All around them were walls of hard, blue clay still showing the signs of the original picks used to dig it. There would be no lunch for them that day.

Ten feet further down, they struck what sounded like a wooden treasure chest. It was, instead, a platform of extremely old logs set tightly into the pit and caulked with ship's putty. As they loosened the logs and began to drag them out, they realized they had to be excavating a very old shaft---the logs were all quite rotten, suggesting they had been buried for many years. Underneath the logs was more clay. The boys, exhausted and intrigued, gave up for the day. They were careful to get home before dark.

Weeks later, they got down to twenty feet and hit another log platform caulked in the same manner as the first. There was no way they could have known, but this wood has since been carbon-dated to 1575, the era of the Spanish conquest. By October, they had gotten down to thirty feet and another layer of logs and winter was coming.

With only picks and shovels, the boys had dug as deep as they could, but they weren't ready to give up. They tried to convince their neighbors that what they had found could make them all rich. It was no use. No one was interested. Most feared the island and thought it was still haunted. The boys finally had to admit defeat.

When Daniel and John took wives, however, they moved onto the island, which they had by now named "Oak Island." They continued trying to raise capital to excavate the pit, but people were still scared and money was scarce. The deserted pit began to fill back in with dirt and dead leaves.

Eight years after the first attempt of 1795, John's wife went to the mainland to deliver her first child. She told her doctor, Simeon Lynds, the story of her husband's discovery. Doctor Lynds was absolutely fascinated. He raised enough money for a major excavation. In 1803, work once again commenced on the pit.

In the years the boys had not dug, the pit collected several feet of mud and debris, and this had to be removed before the workers could get down to where the boys had quit. Days later, using buckets, ropes, and pulleys, the new excavators hauled out the last layer of logs at thirty feet and started digging again. To their amazement, they encountered a thick layer of coconut fiber at the thirty-five foot mark, presumably hauled there from the West Indies, two thousand miles away. What could it all possibly mean?

At forty feet, the workmen encountered another platform of logs, then another at fifty, and another at sixty, all the way down to ninety feet. Each level was sealed with something different. Although no one kept records, it is generally believed that at forty feet it was oak and putty; at fifty feet, plain oak; at sixty feet, oak with putty and coconut fiber; at seventy feet, plain oak; at eighty feet, oak and putty. If there was treasure in the pit, it was buried not only deep, but ingeniously.

At ninety feet, they came upon a layer of ship's putty as hard as brick. Breaking through it, they discovered immediately below a rectangular stone with unintelligible hieroglyphics on one side. They sensed they were on to something important, but the letters were like none they had ever seen, and the stone was of a type unknown in Nova Scotia. Was it a sign that they were close to the treasure---or a warning? Deciding it had no obvious significance, John Smith took it home and built it into his fireplace for safe-keeping, facing the inscription into the room in case someone could be found who could later decode it.

Months passed, until working very late one evening probing at ninety-eight feet, they finally heard the welcome sound of a large hollow vault. They all agreed it was wood, and that it was probably a chest. It looked as if their goal was in sight. It was Saturday night and since people did not work on the Sabbath in those days, they called a halt until Monday morning.

At daybreak Monday morning, they eagerly returned, fully anticipating being rewarded for their hard labor. They lowered Daniel McGinnis down. But their expectations were thwarted by a diabolical nightmare waiting in the pit. Thirty feet down, McGinnis fell into water. At least sixty feet of water had somehow filled the pit. The treasure they had almost touched now seemed as far away as the moon.

The workmen set to work trying to bail out the water with buckets, but the level remained the same. They brought in a pump, but it could make no headway against the water. When the pump finally quit from overwork, the water level still remained the same. In total defeat, the men went home.

Two years passed while everyone tried to figure out what to do next. Finally in the spring of 1805, they decided to sink a new shaft next to the old one and at least ten feet deeper. They then planned to tunnel over and retrieve the treasure from underneath. Apparently, none of them were engineers because they dug the shaft too close to the pit and the pressure of the water collapsed the intervening wall, drowning three men and filling the new shaft with water to the same level as the pit. Disillusioned and out of money, the men abandoned the project.

John Smith later wrote, "Had it not been for the various mischiefs nature played on us, we would by now, all of us, be men of means." He never guessed of the true nature of things.

A half century later, in 1849, the inscription on the stone in John Smith's fireplace was decoded. It said, "Forty feet below, two million pounds are buried." This promise of wealth inspired the next group of searchers. Involved in the new group was Dr. David Lynds, a relative of Simeon Lynds, and Anthony Vaughan, the youngest of the original finders. Of the other two original men, McGinnis was now dead, and John Smith chose not to get involved.

Both shafts had by this time caved in, and the new group had to spend considerable time digging another shaft. They dug to a depth of eighty-six feet and were relieved to see no sign of flooding. Again it was a Saturday evening when they finished work. They checked the pit early the next morning before church, and it was still dry. Immensely relieved and congratulating themselves, they went to church. At two in the afternoon, they returned to the shaft and found it filled with water sixty feet deep. The Money Pit had struck again.

The next day, they began bailing out the water. In the words of one man, "The result appeared as unsatisfactory as taking soup with a fork." When pumping failed to lower the water level, they decided to send down a test drill and find out what really lay at the bottom of the pit.

They constructed a platform over the pit and drilled two holes, 106 feet deep, west of the center line. Nothing but mud was retrieved. On the first attempt to drill east of the center line, they encountered conclusive evidence of something buried in the pit. Following is a report from the man who conducted the drilling:

"After going through the platform (at ninety-eight feet) which was five inches thick, and proved to be spruce, the auger dropped twelve inches and then went through four inches of oak; then it went through twenty-two inches of metal in pieces; but the auger failed to bring up anything in the nature of treasure, except three links resembling the links of an ancient watch chain. It then went through eight inches of oak, which was thought to be the bottom of the first box and the top of the next; then twenty-two inches of oak and six inches of spruce, then into clay seven feet without striking anything."

The links of the watch chain turned out to be gold. For the first time, there was evidence of fabulous wealth.

The next bore brought up only pieces of wood and coconut fiber, but it stumbled as it drilled, suggesting the presence of two chests, one of top the other. On the fifth and final bore, they decided to minutely examine everything coming up from the pit. All was going well, until one of the men accused the foreman, a man named James Pitblado, of taking something from the auger and concealing it in his pocket. When confronted, Pitblado refused to produce it, saying he would give it to the group as a whole at the next meeting of the directors of the project.

He never did, and it is known that he tried to persuade a local businessman to buy the entire east end of Oak Island. The businessman agreed, but the search group would not sell. Shortly afterward, Pitblado died in a mining accident. He never revealed what he found, and legend insists that it was a jewel.

It remained for this group of searchers to get to the chests. They decided to dig another shaft next to the original and tunnel across, retrieving the treasure from underneath. They got down to 109 feet without encountering water, only to be deluged when they attempted to tunnel across. Their new shaft filled to the same level as the first---thirty feet down from the top of the pit.

One of the men took to studying the pit. He discovered that the water in the pit rose and fell with the tides, but the pit was in clay and should have been immune to the tides. When he reported his findings to the group, they knew there had to be a tunnel open to the sea.

Exploring at nearby Smith's Cove, located five hundred feet northeast of the pit, they discovered five stone-lined drainage channels between the high and low water mark. These channels led toward a funnel-shaped sump just above the high water line. From the sump, the water passed along a downward sloping passage to the Money Pit, reaching it just below the ninety-foot mark. Even more bizarre, they found tons of coconut husk fiber three feet thick under the sand on the beach, and they knew the nearest coconut tree was two thousand miles away. Under the fiber was a layer of kelp five inches deep, and under the kelp was a layer of flat stones. This man-made sponge covered the beach like a blanket. Their hopes of blocking the water went out with the first tide.

The men were dejected, but still hopeful because all the elaborate precautions suggested immense wealth in the pit. After much discussion among themselves, they decided to dam up the bay with a cofferdam of the type used to repair the keels of ocean-going vessels. They had almost completed the structure when an unusually high tide knocked it down. They decided to block the tunnel from the beach, but the high tides prevented that, too. They decided to intersect the tunnel between the beach and the pit, but their first attempt missed it completely.

They decided to dig another shaft close to the pit, but when they encountered a boulder at thirty-five feet and removed the boulder, the shaft flooded. Thoroughly confused, they decided they had struck the flood tunnel (failing to reason that the original shaft would have flooded at thirty-five feet if that were the case) and drove timbers into the ground to dam the tunnel. Failing again to stop the water, they decided on another shaft. They were down around 118 feet and starting to tunnel to the original shaft, when water again broke through and flooded them out. They finally decided to abandon the project altogether.

In 1859, they tried again. They dug more shafts in an attempt to drain the pit or divert the flood tunnel. Everything failed. In 1861, they replaced the manual pumps with steam pumps, but the boiler exploded from the strain, and one man was killed. Again, they abandoned the project.

Many more people got interested in the pit. Over the years, more shafts were dug and more shafts filled with water, until the area around the Money Pit resembled the bombed out beaches of Normandy after World War II. Then in 1866, the place where the water tunnel entered the pit was finally found. It was 110 feet deep, two and a half feet wide, and four feet high. It was also now useless to plug the tunnel because the honeycombed area around the pit let water in from dozens of different directions. Once again, the treasure hunters had to admit defeat. One of the men, Isaac Blair, told his nephew Frederick, "I saw enough to convince me that there was treasure buried there, and also enough to convince me that they will never get it."

In 1893, Frederick Blair, now a twenty-four-year-old Nova Scotia insurance salesman, formed another search party. In desperation, they dynamited the channels. The last charge seemed to blast through into a subterranean chamber because people over at the pit, 450 feet away, noticed a sudden turbulence in the water. They hoped they had finally managed to collapse the water tunnel and stop the flow of water, but they were unable to pump the pit dry. Totally discouraged and ready to give up, they decided on one last approach. They once again drilled into the pit.

By now, they had no way of knowing exactly where anything was in the waterlogged hole. At a depth of 126 feet, they encountered an obstruction they thought was iron. They bored through it to a depth of 151 feet, where they encountered a layer of cement. Two feet below this, they bored through five inches of oak wood and could hear loose metal which they took to be coins rattling around at the end of the drill. The workmen now thought there were two treasures in the pit: one consisting of two wooden chests at ninety-eight feet and another sealed in a cement chamber at 151 feet. When the drill was raised, a tiny fragment of parchment with the initials "V. I." came out, too.

They tried a second descent and missed everything. A third descent put them into a channel of underground water. Suspicious that they might have a second flood tunnel much lower than the first and located where they considered the main treasure sealed in cement at the 151 foot mark to be, they poured concentrated dye into the Money Pit and kept a close watch on the shoreline. The dye came up, but to their amazement, on both sides of the island. They finally realized that the entire island had been engineered to constantly flood the pit. They sank six more shafts in an effort to block off the new flood tunnel, before finally giving up in total defeat.

By the end of the 19th Century, the original site was totally destroyed and only a quagmire remained. Also, two more workmen were dead, and the diabolical pit still kept its secret. The next century would bring even more provocative clues and even greater tragedy.

Perhaps as intriguing as the treasure itself was the question of who took such elaborate means to conceal it in the first place? That infamous scoundrel, Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, once boasted, "I've buried my treasure where none but Satan and myself can find it." Maybe he had Oak Island in mind. According to local gossip, Teach had been in the area, as well as Morgan, Steve Bonney, and other notorious scum of the seven seas.

All the coconut fiber suggested South America. One theory held that a Spanish galleon, wrecked on Oak Island, had to conceal a fortune in Mayan or Incan treasure. Others believed the lost crown jewels of France were buried there. It was a well-known fact that when Marie Antoinette was guillotined, her lady-in-waiting, the ambitious Countess Lamont, escaped across the Atlantic to Nova Scotia. One search party in 1909 was convinced of this theory, and one of the diggers on that expedition was a young lawyer on summer vacation: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Later scholarship, however, proved the jewels never left France, and the diggers were left with the pirate loot theory.

In 1937, a wealthy New Jersey businessman, Gilbert D. Heddon, decided on a different approach to a solution. He reasoned that by blocking the second flood tunnel, the quagmire would eventually dry out. The obvious way to block the tunnel was to locate the floodgate, and he thought the best way to do that was to research pirate lore.

He stumbled upon what he thought was an authentic treasure map in an obscure book, Captain Kidd and his Skeleton Island, written in 1935 by Harold Wilkins. The map had an obvious similarity to Oak Island despite its claim that it was situated in the China Sea. It also occurred to Heddon that the French word for oak was chene. Further, since Kidd himself claimed that his treasure, valued at more $100,000 pounds, was buried on an island in the China Sea, Heddon thought maybe Kidd was playing foreign word games in a deliberate attempt to mislead searchers. Most importantly, the map included specific bearings and measurements:

18 W and by 7 E on Rock
30 SW 14 N Tree
7 x 8 x 4

Amos Noss worked for Heddon that year. He recalled how they studied the Kidd map and searched the underbrush on the island south of the Money Pit.

"I took a pick and a shovel and I went down where it was hot amid the mosquitoes, flies, and things that bother you. I didn't know what I was looking for, but George Heddon told me he thought whatever it was, was within fifty feet or so. Finally, I struck the rock, then two or three rocks. I tore up the sod and I knew I had something. I continued to the end of the rocks and came back down the other side. I knew I had what he was looking for."

What Noss uncovered was a large triangle of stones in the shape of an arrowhead pointing north.

George Bates was on the survey crew that rushed to the island to check out the discovery. Bates sighted from the borehole found in a boulder near the triangle to the borehole found in the stone at Smith's Cove (uncovered by the three original searchers in 1795) and measured the distance between the two points. In the Old English system of measurement, it was just over twenty-five rods. (A rod is sixteen and a half feet.)

Bates then calculated a position eighteen rods west of one stone and seven rods east of the other. Thirty rods southwest from this point took him precisely to the stone triangle. Then "14 N Tree." The triangle pointed exactly due north towards the Money Pit.

"This seemed to confirm that the Kidd map did mean that treasure was in the vicinity," said George Bates.

George Heddon was elated, but not for long. Events took a bizarre turn when the book's author, Harold Wilkins, came forward and claimed that he had fabricated the Kidd map. He said he had never heard of Oak Island, and he drew the map from memory from an old map he had once seen in a private collection. He was totally stunned by George Heddon's story.

When George Heddon admitted defeat, others began to entertain the idea that the Money Pit was all an elaborate hoax. Reports later, however, dispelled that rumor.

D'Arcy O'Connor, a Montreal journalist and considered the leading expert on the Oak Island enigma, reported in 1976, "I have seen the coconut fiber that has been brought up. I have seen reports by the Smithsonian and by independent botanists stating that it is definitely coconut fiber. I have seen carbon-dating results that Triton has gotten showing that it's several hundreds of years old, that it's not glacial wood that they're finding under the ground. The metal that they're finding is pre-1750, and it's coming deep from under the ground. So, there's no possible way that it's a natural phenomenon or a hoax. Someone was there at some time, and I can only assume to bury something of great value."

To add still more confusion to the situation, Edwin H. Hamilton, taking over after George Heddon called it quits, discovered that the mouth of the second flood tunnel joined the Money Pit from the same side as the first one, originating at Smith's Cove on the northeast side of the island. It did not run south to the other side, as Blair's red dye experiment had indicated. By drilling down to 180 feet, he was able to determine that an underground stream below the second tunnel had carried the red dye to the wrong side of the island, thus confusing the searchers.

In 1950, Mel Chapel bought Oak Island because he was convinced of the existence of a treasure. His father had been one of the drillers in 1897, who had found the tiny fragment of parchment no larger than a dime. Chapel preserved the fragment, and the writing sustained his belief in a buried treasure. "And my opinion and his opinion was that it's of immense value, whatever it is," he concluded.

Oak Island survey plan

Nine years later, Chapel leased treasure trove rights to Robert Restall and his wife, Mildred. They gave up their careers as circus daredevils to move to the island, where Restall was convinced he would find the treasure and make a fortune for his family. He had no wealthy backers and no elaborate equipment, but his obsession carried him and his two boys, Bobby and Rich, through six years of back-breaking toil. They were driven, mesmerized by the prospects of the unknown wealth.

On 17 August 1965, an old pump was draining a twenty-seven foot shaft. No one knows for sure, but deadly carbon monoxide gas may have collected in the pit. Robert Restall started down. He became dizzy and fell. Bobby thought his father had suffered a heart attack and rushed down to save him. Two other workmen failed to realize what was wrong and also toppled in. The autopsy reports read, "death by drowning."

Three days after the Restall tragedy, a California conglomerate moved in. They tried the brute force approach with a seventy-foot clam digger, scooping out a hole eighty-feet wide and 130 feet deep. They successfully managed to obliterate all traces of the treasure pit---and they found nothing.

The mystery remains. Is it Captain Kidd's treasure in the pit? It seems unlikely. Kidd died in 1701. Besides, it would have been difficult for him to command a bunch of impatient cutthroats in the tedious digging and designing necessary to establish such a pit. What about a stranded vessel from the Spanish conquest, as suggested by the carbon dating of the wood at the 200-ft depth as being circa 1525?  This also appears unlikely, since the area around Oak Island in those years was uninhabited.  Why would a Spanish vessel laden with gold need to construct such an elaborate safety deposit box if no one lived in the area?  There's even the theory that the medieval Order of the Knights Templar buried their horde of gold on Oak Island, a theory that has lost favor these days, since so much is known about the mechanisms of the Order than is known about the diabolical genius behind the Oak Island pit.  A better suggestion was made by Rupert Furneaux in his book, The Money Pit. He suggests that all that skill and precise work could only have been conducted by military engineers. He believes the British army, retreating in 1780 to Hallifax, Nova Scotia, from the American army in the United States's War for Independence, landed on Oak Island and built the pit to hide their war chests and payroll. Was it ever retrieved and taken to England? Who knows? No one has ever seen anything of value come from the pit.

The search continues. After three hundred years, the secret of Oak Island has eluded all the resources of modern technology. Many fortune seekers have watched the indicator needles on their electronic gear flutter to match their own hearts, but one and all, they have had to admit defeat. A new team of searchers has dug down to 230 feet and that team is preparing to spend $3 million dollars scooping out the entire end of the island, if necessary. But will they find treasure? Many theorize that the chests have long rotted away, and whatever was in them is now scattered...perhaps beyond retrieval. Still, no one is willing to give up.

Whether it's one man with a pick and shovel or a giant corporation with bulldozers and dynamite, an unending obsession has drawn treasure hunters to Oak Island to find out what's there. Whoever conceived and executed the fiendish Money Pit has, so far, managed to outwit them all.

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