Dan Blankenship’s 40-year search for the secret treasure of the Money Pit

By Joe O'Connor (link)

Golf ? It is a waste of time. And vacations, well, there is no time for those either, no reason to be lying about in the Florida sun sipping umbrella drinks when there is work to be done.

And there is always more work, and never enough time, not for Dan Blankenship. Not for the past 40 odd years. Not for a hopelessly driven dreamer with gold in his eyes.

He is 87. Don’t ask about retirement. There is no quitting, no turning back, especially with the clock winding forward, ticking down to a Dec. 31 deadline that changes everything.

“It is way too late [to turn back],” says Mr. Blankenship. “It’s been too late for a good many years. I had a good contracting business in Florida. I had friends, a good reputation, and I shucked it all to come up here and make a gamble.”

Here, is Oak Island, just off the coast of Nova Scotia, near the well-heeled town of Chester. It is a 56-hectare postage stamp shrouded by trees and central to a mystery that has been tormenting treasure hunters, like Dan Blankenship, for more than 200 years.

Nova Scotia farmers, Texas oilmen, Boston financiers, New York dandies, celebrity daredevils, Hollywood legends (John Wayne), even an American President (Franklin D. Roosevelt), have been bewitched by tales of the Money Pit.

It is a Canadian cliffhanger dating back to 1795. A teenager happened upon a clearing, saw an oak tree with a missing branch and beneath it, an unusual depression in the earth. So he began to dig, an excavation that revealed an underground shaft — a Money Pit.

In the years since, fortunes have been swallowed, hopes dashed, partnerships fractured, friendships ended and six lives lost in a hunt for what, nobody knows.

Some say it is pirate booty, perhaps even the riches of Captain Kidd himself. Others imagine Aztec gold, the lost treasures of the Templar Knights, a tomb for Norse kings or even Shakespeare’s original manuscripts.

It could be anything, or nothing at all. All that is required are the dreamers to keep on dreaming about what it might be.

“I read about Oak Island in the January, 1965, issue of Reader’s Digest,” Mr. Blankenship says. “I handed the article to my wife and said, read this. She read it and shrugged, said, “So what ?”

 

Photo Scott Dunlop/Postmedia News

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