Secret Treasure of Oak Island: The Amazing True Story of a Centuries-Old Treasure Hunt

This book is both fascinating and inadvertently funny. I found myself laughing with happiness (glee?) at some parts of it, contemplating what just might be an amazing prank that’s played out over hundreds of years.

Way, way back in 1795, three Canadian teenagers found a depressed area of ground on a small island off the coast of Nova Scotia. It was under a tree that was missing a limb, as if it was a hoist for something.

So, they started digging. Down about 10 feet, they found a wooden platform. They kept digging. They found another one. And then they found more stuff. They kept digging. As they recruited more people and got further and further down, it became obvious that someone had hidden something here.

Excavation got more serious, and then, after they had reached a certain point, they found that the hole had filled up with water overnight. Unwittingly, they had set off one or more “water traps,” which were side tunnels leading from the main hole out to the ocean, which intentionally flooded the main tunnel after it got to a certain depth.

Fast forward 300 years, and people are still looking for this treasure. Or the treasure they think might be there, because no one has found anything.

To be fair, there’s a lot of weirdness on Oak Island. They’ve found fragments of maps, stones arranged in peculiar patterns, coconut fibers from trees 1,500 miles away, man-made timbers that have been carbon-dated to the 1500s, etc. There’s no doubt that something is (or was) hidden on Oak Island. It’s just that no one can find it.

The author of this book has to be one of the longest-tenured scholars of Oak Island. He’s never hunted the treasure himself, but he’s been an interested observer for about 50 years. He relays conversations he’s had with people from the 1970s, and he’s visited the site seemingly dozens of times.

Thousands of people have tried to find this treasure. Attempts get more and more sophisticated as technology gets better, and there’s been a “documentary” TV show for a while now, which has helped with funding. But they still haven’t found anything, no matter how much they dig.

The book is a comprehensive history of anyone who has tried to find whatever is there. It covers all the attempts, all the crackpots, all the failures, even all of the tragic deaths. All along, enough happens to entice people to keep looking.

The author seems very even-headed and rational, as opposed to a lot of the weirdos and crackpots that have come out of the woodwork. He maintains that someone hid something on Oak Island in the 1400s or 1500s. The most plausible theory is that it was a Spanish galleon that was damaged, and hid its cargo there until it could be repaired. He supports this with a good history, and manages to examine and debunk about every other theory.

But here’s the key question: assuming that something of value was buried there – which seems likely – is it still there? He’s doubtful about that.

The book is fabulously entertaining. Like I said, I would actually laugh out loud in some places because I could just imagine these treasure hunters getting discouraged, then finding something that suddenly re-energized them.

Just one more day. Just one more dig. Untold riches are always right around the next corner.

(Here’s the dig site on Google Maps. It’s still under active excavation.)

For lots of these people, I imagine Oak Island is like a bad relationship that they just can’t let go of, while it slowly destroys their life.

I loved this book.