The Curse of Oak Island Treasure Breakdown

Here’s what we got: a legendary treasure
buried on a remote island off the coast
of Nova Scotia over 300 years ago, hidden
by a pirate that left booby traps,
ciphers to the code, and a bounty that
today would be worth over
$150 million. But even though thousands
of people have spent countless years all
in search of this one treasure, no one
has been able to find it. So the question
is, is the treasure actually real? I’m
going to go find out.

You see, Cena’s going to get the
treasure, guys! Just a quick flight to, uh,
Nova Scotia real quick. Um, I don’t know.
I don’t know; I’m always iffy with buried
treasure. It feels like one of those
things that’s very fantastical. Yeah, so I
mean, pirates did exist and still do
exist, maybe not in the way that we think
about. It’s happened; people have found
treasure, I believe. Yeah, oh yeah. It’s
kind of an interesting thought. Do you
think the treasure could be real? I so
badly want a treasure to exist,
but I feel like most treasures, if they
exist, somebody took it and didn’t say a
damn thing. Yeah, so like it was there, but
then somebody found it, left with it, and
just let everybody else keep digging, or
it got washed out to sea. Yeah, yeah.

Seven thoughts on buried treasure: honestly,
I think it’s there. I bet it’s there. Okay,
all right, so we got a little bit of
world. It’s buried somewhere. All right,
well, maybe I can sway you guys’ opinions a
little bit. Let’s start with a little bit of
background. This story goes all the way
back to the 1600s and it starts with
a guy named Captain Kidd. Captain Kidd
worked as a privateer for the English
government. Now, privateer, that’s
basically a fancy word that means legal
pirate. You see, Captain Kidd was hired by
the English government to protect their
trade routes, but in reality, his main
goal was to capture enemy ships and take
their valuable cargo like a pirate.

To make a long story short, the English
government ended up turning their backs
on Captain Kidd and a lot of other
privateers, so he was executed in 1701
for piracy. But legend has it that before
he was killed, he buried all of his
treasure on a remote island off the
coast of Nova Scotia. Oak Island is like,
is Captain Kidd like a super famous
pirate? ‘Cause I’ve never heard of him.
I mean, I’ve never heard of him until I
started looking into this story, but he’s
well-known enough that he’s got like a
Wikipedia page. Let’s put it that way:
there’s a chance he actually had treasure.
Oh yeah, I have heard of Captain Kidd
because he is like parodied a lot in
media, but it always just sounds like a
made-up character. But it’s like
Blackbeard—it’s just one of those
characters that keeps appearing. So
kind of between that time he was executed in
1701 and the 1800s, it becomes this
legend in Nova Scotia and in parts of
Canada, sort of a bedtime story that
people would tell their kids. There was
this pirate; his name was Captain Kidd. He
buried his treasure on Oak Island. That’s
why nobody lives on that island; that’s
why it’s totally deserted because the
treasure is haunted and all these, you
know, these things. So maybe elements
of truth that are then exaggerated to
make it more fantastical for a kid’s
bedtime story.

But in 1795, the theories about the treasure
being real kind of start to get a little
bit more evidence behind them. So there’s
this kid; his name is Daniel McGinnis—great
name, uh, unrelated, no relation to me—and
Daniel McGinnis is like a 16-year-old, and
one day he decides to paddle over from Nova
Scotia, where he lives, to Oak Island. He’s
going to do some hunting, just kind of
look for some game over there. But when
he lands on the shore, he notices
something kind of strange.

Treasure? X marks the
spot! When Daniel landed on Oak Island, he
noticed two things: one, a pulley system—or
at least what was left of one—was just
hanging from a tree, rusting. It looked
like it had been there for years, and two,
just below the pulley system, there was
this sunken patch of ground. It was
about 12 ft wide; it kind of looked
like somebody had dug a hole, but they
hadn’t filled it in all the way. Daniel
started thinking back to his childhood,
all the stories that he’d heard of
Captain Kidd, the secret treasure that he’d
left on Oak Island, and that’s when he
realized maybe this is where it was
buried. The next day, Daniel came back to
the island with two of his friends, and
they all started digging where that
sunken patch of ground was. About 10 ft
down in the ground, they finally hit
something solid. At first, they thought
it was treasure, so they started digging
faster, but soon they realized it was
actually something stranger: it was a solid
wood platform made of these oak logs
that had been tied together. Obviously,
a little disappointing it wasn’t the treasure
they were hoping for, but they took it as
a sign that they were on the right track.

So they removed the logs and kept on
digging, and by the time they got 20 ft
down in the ground, they hit another oak
platform. They removed all the logs again
and they kept digging until it got dark.
They made it all the way down to 30 ft
in the ground where they hit another oak
platform. So we’ve got a pattern going on
here: every 10 ft, they’re hitting one of
these oak platforms. And even though they
didn’t find the treasure, they now had
irrefutable proof that somebody had been
here before.

Dang, yeah, I mean, that’s indisputable.
That’s man-made! Yeah, and it wasn’t like,
you know, oh, there’s just some like
sticks or twigs or—like this was a
platform that was tied together with
string and it was made of oak logs, and it
spanned the entire kind of perimeter of
the hole that they were digging. It was
massive. There’s a part of me that, like
putting all this together, I’m like it
could have been used to lower in, and
this could have been used to do that, but
there’s also an entire chance that it
was the exact opposite situation:
somebody already found it, and that was
their system to get it out.

Oh, I didn’t even think about it like that!
So you’re saying that the pulley was there
because somebody took the treasure out of
the hole, and the platforms are there
because like when they were filling in
the hole, they needed something? Why would
they fill in the hole? What’s the point?
They already have the treasure! If you
already have the treasure, yeah, why
conservation? Nachos! Like when I go to
the beach and I dig a big hole, the
lifeguards are always like, “You gotta
fill that back in!”

You go to beaches with lifeguards?
It’s plausible! I just, again, I don’t see
why they would fill—like if you already
have it, who cares? Any—this, I don’t
know! Fair enough, fair enough! That’s
kind of the whole point of this—I’m
trying to figure it out! I guess that’s a
good point, unless they want to troll them.
You just put the platforms in an elaborate
prank in the 1800s with no power tools?
Captain Kidd’s like, “We’re going to dig a
big hole and we’re going to put oak
platforms down there and they’re going
to think there’s a treasure! It’ll be
hilarious!” And then he got killed.

So back to Daniel and his friends: they
knew they were going to need more manpower
if they ever had any hope of finding the
treasure. Clearly, whoever had buried it
there had set up quite a few obstacles.
But every single person that they asked
over the next 10 years turned them down.
Either they thought the treasure wasn’t
real, that it was a complete myth, or they
believed in the treasure but they
thought it was cursed, and they didn’t
want anything to do with that. It wasn’t
until 1804 that they finally found
someone who was willing to take a chance
on them. It was this guy, Simeon Lind,
from Nova Scotia. He was extremely wealthy,
and he offered them money, equipment,
manpower—anything they needed to search for
the treasure—all he was asking for in
exchange was a cut if they ever found
anything good.

So almost 10 years after they first
started, the boys were finally able to
continue digging. Just a quick refresher
for