

Booby-Trapped Treasure Buried off the Coast of Nova Scotia? - DarrenMills
http://www.unmuseum.org/oakisl.htm

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tom_rath
Yeah, because the most likely thing for pirates to do when they come into a
bundle of loot is sail to the middle of nowhere and spend a few years
engineering crafty traps beneath which they will permanently store their cash.

Outside of novels, movies and video games, pirates didn't bury their spoils:
They spent it. The only treasure to be found in stories like these comes out
of the pockets of the gullible souls who search for it.

~~~
mechanical_fish
It does seem noteworthy that nobody in this story ever finds any actual
_money_ in the so-called "money pit", or even a hint that there is money. It's
like a 200-year-old game of telephone: "someone said that someone said that
there's money at the bottom of the pit!"

Incidentally, and yet again, Wikipedia is a much better source than the
original submission:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island>

On Wikipedia they tell a _really_ funny story about a stone that was allegedly
found in the pit, with "symbols" that turned out to be a "cipher message" that
alluded to Tons of Money lying somewhere below. The stone later disappeared,
of course. Shucks. Why does that always seem to happen to these mysterious
cipher stones that only one person can read? Maybe some angels took the stone
up to heaven so that we wouldn't find the Holy Grail. Or something.

Wikipedia also alludes to an important hypothesis, itself dating back to 1911:
The "money pit" was a natural sinkhole, the early excavators' discoveries of
"man-made platforms" were the product of starry-eyed optimism, and
(conveniently!) the site eventually became so torn up by treasure hunters that
nobody will ever be able to reconstruct what was originally there. And so the
game of telephone will continue into the indefinite future.

~~~
DarrenMills
The cipher message told to dig another 30 feet to find the treasure. Then 10
feet lower a man made tunnel was found leading to the water, it instantly
flooded the tunnel.

Every 10 feet was a layer of logs that was left over from the construction.

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bcl
I've been reading stories about this place since I was a kid. Given the state
of the art in archeology you would think that they could have solved this
mystery by now -- if there was anything to solve.

Seems to me it has turned into a marketing campaign for the island instead of
a real search for treasure.

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modoc
Must be the story behind this book:
<http://www.prestonchild.com/books/riptide/>

~~~
ygd_coder
That's a fictional story.

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fname
The History Channel just aired a 2-hour special that included an in-depth
discussion titled "Holy Grail in America" which talked about the island and
the Money Pit. I would recommend catching it if you missed it.

Pretty fascinating as it really gets down to how the Knights Templar
discovered America perhaps hundreds of years before Columbus.

[http://www.history.com/shows.do?action=detail&episodeId=...](http://www.history.com/shows.do?action=detail&episodeId=481900)

~~~
jwb119
is it me or has the history channel gotten more and more out there with their
definition of "history"?

i personally found the "holy grail in america" show to be just a bunch of
sensationalist conspiracy theory talk.. 15 minutes of wikipedia-ing shows how
out implausible most of the theory that they mentioned is

~~~
nimaj
_is it me or has the history channel gotten more and more out there with their
definition of "history"?_

Sadly, it seems to be the norm these days:
<http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NetworkDecay>

~~~
ygd_coder
Well, they have to do something to get people to watch. Imagine how may people
out there almost fall asleep when they hear the word "History".

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lbrdn
I might have just found a new obsession.

Here's a google map: <http://ow.ly/qfC2>

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afed
That seems like pretty heavy engineering for a pirate crew.

