Booby-Trapped Treasure Buried off the Coast of Nova Scotia? | Hacker News Reader

Booby-Trapped Treasure Buried off the Coast of Nova Scotia?

unmuseum.org

38 pointsDarrenMills17 comments

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.

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.

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.

The story/article mentions that the pit is unlikely to be the work of pirates.

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.

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

That's a fictional story.

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=...

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

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

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".

It certainly has tilted in the direction of entertainment over education. It's unfortunate because I do believe there's an audience for serious content. Like most these things days there are much better resources online. The History Channel (like the Discovery Channel and others) exist for people who are curious but not curious enough to step away from the TV.

Oak Island is not that far from where I live, it's been pretty much stripped clean. This has been going on for decades.

Farther north east over in Newfoundland is where the Vikings had a settlement and there are some clues up north; Labrador and Nunavut, in the form of stone carvings of hooded monks with Celtic cross symbols.

Add to that the Clovis culture in the eastern USA and I'd say people have been in eastern US/Canada many times over the last few thousand years, before the native people arrived.

before the native people arrived.

I home you meant after the native people arrived.

I hope you meant HOPE not HOME. ;)

I might have just found a new obsession.

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

That seems like pretty heavy engineering for a pirate crew.

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