Oak Island is a small 140-acre island in Mahone Bay on the south shore of Nova Scotia, Canada. According to island tradition, in the summer of 1795 three teenagers — Daniel McGinnis, John Smith, and Anthony Vaughan — noticed a circular depression on the ground in a stand of oaks at the island's eastern end, along with a block-and-tackle rig hanging from an overhead oak branch. They began digging and uncovered a shaft lined with flagstones and equipped, at regular intervals, with wooden platforms. At ten feet, thirty feet, and ninety feet they struck horizontal oaken log layers with coconut fiber and hardened charcoal between them — coconut fiber being a material foreign to Nova Scotia.
At approximately ninety feet the excavators reportedly found a large stone inscribed with a cipher that was later translated as 'Forty feet below, two million pounds are buried.' Shortly after, the pit rapidly flooded with sea water through an apparent engineered flood tunnel connecting the shaft to a distant cove — a defense mechanism that has thwarted every subsequent excavation for more than two centuries.
Treasure hunters since 1795 have included the Onslow Company, the Truro Company, Frederick Blair, Franklin D. Roosevelt (who personally joined a 1909 dig as a young man), and the Triton Alliance. Six people have died in the pursuit. Items recovered during later drilling include fragments of wood, iron, coconut fiber, a parchment scrap with the letters 'vi' visible, and in 1971 a borehole camera reportedly showed three chests and a severed hand at a depth of 230 feet, though no one has been able to verify or retrieve the image.
Theories of what lies at the bottom include Captain Kidd's pirate treasure, the Knights Templar's lost library, Sir Francis Bacon's Shakespeare manuscripts, Spanish galleon plunder, and French royal treasure hidden during the Seven Years' War. Since 2014, the History Channel's 'The Curse of Oak Island' has followed a new excavation led by brothers Rick and Marty Lagina, reviving global interest in what remains the longest-running treasure mystery in North America.