97 Fun Facts About Treasure Hunts

Before hiding his treasure chest, Forrest Fenn made his fortune as what?

Art dealer: Fenn, a former Air Force fighter pilot, ran a Santa Fe gallery and said he hid the chest to get people off their couches and into the outdoors.

Who wrote the classic adventure novel 'Treasure Island'?

Robert Louis Stevenson began the story on a rainy holiday in Braemar in 1881, when he drew a map of an imaginary island to amuse his stepson Lloyd and started inventing a tale to go with it.

Which pirate captured the French slave ship La Concorde in 1717 and renamed it Queen Anne's Revenge?

Blackbeard took the slaver about 100 miles from Martinique, made it his flagship and ran it aground at Beaufort Inlet, North Carolina, the following year, where archaeologists later identified the wreck.

What outdoor activity involves using a GPS receiver or mobile device to find hidden containers?

Geocaching was first called the 'Great American GPS Stash Hunt'; players swapped 'stash' for 'cache' within weeks because of the first word's negative connotations.

Which Spanish treasure galleon, lost in a 1622 hurricane, did Mel Fisher's divers finally find in 1985?

Nuestra Señora de Atocha went down with a treasure fleet shortly after leaving Havana; Fisher's team combed the seabed for sixteen years before reaching its main cargo of silver and gold.

Which spot off Nova Scotia has drawn treasure hunters for over two centuries with tales of a 'Money Pit'?

Oak Island has never given up a treasure: six men have died digging for it, and legend says a seventh must die before it is found.

In the 1985 film The Goonies, what legendary pirate's treasure are the children searching for?

One-Eyed Willy's map sends the Goonies underground after his hoard, their one hope of saving their families' homes from foreclosure.

The legendary lost city of gold, El Dorado, was believed to be located in which continent?

South America's Muisca, skilled goldsmiths of the Andean highlands, began the legend, which swelled into a whole city of gold; their golden raft now sits in Bogotá's Museo del Oro.

What was the common name for the Spanish silver dollar linked to pirate treasure?

Piece of eight means eight reales' worth of silver; one eighth of it was a 'bit', which is why Americans still call a quarter 'two bits'.

In April 1945 US troops found the Reichsbank's gold hidden in what at Merkers?

A salt mine: two displaced French women stopped by US military police said the gold was stored there, and the 90th Infantry Division found more than 8,000 gold bars; Eisenhower came to see it within days.

Which navigator's instrument uses two mirrors to measure the angle between the horizon and the sun or a star?

A sextant is named for its arc, a sixth of a circle; its mirrors bring the sun down to the horizon in one view, so the reading holds steady even on a rolling ship.

What map feature shows the cardinal directions and their intermediate points, often drawn as a star?

A compass rose often marks north with a fleur-de-lis, a custom the Portuguese mapmaker Pedro Reinel introduced in the early 1500s and other mapmakers quickly copied.

In which US state was the first GPS-located cache, a bucket holding a logbook and a slingshot, hidden in May 2000?

Oregon: the first bucket was hidden near Beavercreek, Oregon, on 3 May 2000, the day after the US switched off GPS 'selective availability' and made civilian receivers accurate enough to locate a small container.

Well-digging farmers in 1974 uncovered the Terracotta Army guarding which emperor's tomb?

Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor, had the clay army made to guard him in the afterlife; the mound over his own burial chamber nearby remains unexcavated.

What was a civilian ship licensed by its government to attack enemy shipping in wartime called?

A privateer carried a letter of marque, so a prize court could approve its captures and the sale was shared among owners and crew; without the papers the same raid was piracy.

What is the general term for goods or valuables taken by force, especially during war or robbery?

Plunder was picked up by English speakers during the Thirty Years' War; the word behind it had first meant nothing worse than household goods.

Which outdoor hobby mixes orienteering, art and puzzle solving, often using rubber stamps?

Letterboxing finders press the box's stamp into their own notebook and leave their personal stamp in the box's logbook, so each side keeps proof of the visit.

Which three encrypted texts supposedly locate treasure buried in Bedford County, Virginia, around 1820?

The Beale Ciphers have given up only one of their three texts, which describes the hoard but not where it lies; many codebreakers suspect the 1885 pamphlet that published them was a hoax.

In Treasure Island, what marks the buried treasure on Captain Flint's map?

Red crosses: Flint's map has three in red ink, one labelled 'Bulk of treasure here', yet the pirates who follow it find an empty pit, because Ben Gunn had already dug the gold up.

In which state was Forrest Fenn's Rocky Mountain treasure chest eventually found?

Wyoming: Forrest Fenn confirmed in 2020 that the chest had been found in Wyoming, ten years after he hid it in 2010; the finder declined to reveal the exact spot.

Which 2009 metal-detector find is the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever discovered?

The Staffordshire Hoard held about 5 kg of gold, far more than Sutton Hoo; detectorist Terry Herbert found it on a farmer friend's land, and the reward was shared between the two.

Which instrument is the 10th-century scholar al-Sufi said to have described more than 1,000 uses for?

The astrolabe: al-Sufi's treatise is said to list more than 1,000 uses, from telling the time to finding the direction of Mecca, and mariners later took a stripped-down version to sea.

Kit Williams' 1979 picture book Masquerade sent Britain digging for what jewelled prize he had buried?

A golden hare: Williams buried the 18-carat jewelled hare at Ampthill, Bedfordshire, in 1979; it was dug up in 1982 by a claimant whose tip-off traced back to Williams's former girlfriend.

Which historical figure is often associated with seeking the legendary 'Fountain of Youth'?

Juan Ponce de León never mentioned the fountain in his own letters; the story was pinned on him after his death, by the chronicler Oviedo in 1535.

What is the study of creating and breaking codes and ciphers?

The word comes from the Greek for 'hidden writing'. Modern cryptography sits at the intersection of mathematics, computer science and engineering, and underpins everything from online shopping to messaging apps.

In trail marking, what is the term for a mark slashed or painted on a tree to show the route?

Forrest Fenn's treasure poem told searchers to look 'quickly down' once they had found 'the blaze', which is why the word is so loaded for treasure hunters.

What is the nautical term for a measurement of water depth, equal to six feet?

A fathom began as the span of a man's outstretched arms, later fixed at six feet; 'to fathom' something still means to get to the bottom of it.

What type of map uses contour lines connecting points of equal elevation?

A topographic map's contour lines connect points of equal elevation, so closely packed lines mean steep ground.

Which pirate captained the Whydah Gally when it sank off Cape Cod in 1717?

Samuel Bellamy had seized the Whydah, a slave ship on her maiden voyage, only two months earlier; when the storm broke her up, just two of her crew survived.

In espionage, what is passing items via a secret location so two agents never meet called?

A dead drop still needs a signal that it has been loaded: convicted spy Aldrich Ames chalked a mark on a mailbox to alert his Russian handlers.

Which of these devices is used for dowsing, a controversial method of finding hidden objects or water?

Divining rods twitch through the dowser's own unconscious muscle movements; under scientific testing the method finds water no better than chance.

What was detectorist Eric Lawes looking for in a Suffolk field in 1992 when he found the Hoxne Hoard?

A lost hammer: a farmer friend had dropped it and asked Lawes to sweep the field. The hammer turned up too, and now sits in the British Museum with the Roman gold and silver.

What is the term for a container of objects and messages sealed away to be opened at a future date?

Time capsule as a term dates from the late 1930s, when Westinghouse sealed one at the 1939 New York World's Fair with orders not to open it until the year 6939.

Which lost 'Eighth Wonder of the World', a chamber given to Peter the Great by Prussia in 1716, vanished in WWII?

The Amber Room was packed up by invading troops in 1941 and taken to Königsberg, where it vanished late in the war; a replica was installed in the Catherine Palace in 2003.

The treasure galleon San José, sunk in 1708, was found in 2015 off which country?

Colombia announced the find near Cartagena, where a British squadron had sunk the ship; its cargo, valued in the billions, set off a long international fight over who owns it.

Treasure Island's sea shanty goes 'Fifteen men on the...' what, before 'Yo, ho, ho, and a bottle of rum'?

Dead Man's Chest was a Virgin Islands place name the author spotted in Charles Kingsley's travel book At Last; he later called those three words the seed of the whole novel.

'Gentleman pirate' Stede Bonnet robbed ships off Virginia in 1717 from a ten-gun vessel of which type?

A sloop: Bonnet, a wealthy Barbados planter with no experience at sea, paid for the Revenge himself and hired a crew of about 70, where most pirates got their first ship by seizing one.

In which party game do teams race to gather every item on an organizer's list?

Scavenger hunt parties were popularised at 1930s society events by gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell, and one became the plot of My Man Godfrey.

What is a short coded message printed as a puzzle for readers to crack by hand called?

Once used for real secrets, cryptograms now mostly appear in newspapers and magazines, and Edgar Allan Poe helped popularise them by challenging readers to send him ciphers to crack.

What process uses sound waves to detect objects underwater, as in shipwreck hunting?

Sonar, 'sound navigation and ranging', maps wrecks with sound because radio waves barely travel through water.

Which sailor's document shows water depths, coastlines and buoys for plotting a safe course?

A nautical chart is called a chart rather than a map because mariners plot their courses on it, which is why its depths and hazards are kept under constant revision.

Which bird, cast in gold and silver, did French treasure hunters seek for 31 years?

An owl: the 1993 book On the Trail of the Golden Owl hid the answer in eleven riddles, and whoever dug up a buried replica could swap it for the real statuette; the replica was finally unearthed in October 2024.

Yamashita's gold, a hoard supposedly hidden by Japanese forces in WWII, is said to lie in which country?

The Philippines, which General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the 'Tiger of Malaya', was sent to defend in 1944; most historians doubt the treasure exists, yet a Hawaiian jury found that Ferdinand Marcos had seized gold a Filipino digger unearthed.

Which fictional archaeology professor first appeared on screen in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)?

Indiana Jones was George Lucas's homage to 1930s serial heroes; his day job is at the fictional Marshall College, named after producer Frank Marshall.

What term is used for the illegal excavation of archaeological sites to find artifacts for personal gain?

Looting strips artifacts of the context that gives them meaning, doing irreparable damage to the historical record.

What does a Travel Bug tag on a trinket left in a GPS cache let its owner do?

Follow it online: each tag carries a unique tracking number that finders log as the trinket moves from cache to cache, and one rode to the International Space Station in 2008.

Which inventor rigged up an early metal detector in 1881 to hunt for the bullet inside President Garfield?

Alexander Graham Bell's device worked in tests but failed at the bedside, partly because the metal bed frame Garfield lay on confused it.

The prize in Kit Williams's Masquerade lay buried beside a cross honouring which queen, Henry VIII's first wife?

Catherine of Aragon's cross stands in Ampthill Park, and Williams buried the prize where the tip of its shadow falls at noon on the equinox, the answer hidden in the book's paintings.

Which pirate, hanged in London in 1701, really did bury treasure, on Gardiners Island off New York?

Captain Kidd hid the cache in 1699 hoping to bargain with it, but New York's governor had it dug up, and it is said to have been used as evidence at his trial.

A box buried for the 1982 puzzle book The Secret turned up in 2019 in which city's North End?

Boston: game designer Jason Krupat and his family dug the third box out of Langone Park in 2019, after finds in Chicago and Cleveland; author Byron Preiss died in 2005 without revealing the rest.

In The Secret, each buried box held a key that could be redeemed for what?

Each gem was worth about $1,000, modest next to the Masquerade hare that inspired the book.

Which Greek philosopher first told the story of Atlantis, the sunken island that treasure hunters still search for?

Plato told it in his dialogues Timaeus and Critias as a moral tale about a proud naval empire swallowed by the sea, not as a map for explorers.

Forrest Fenn's nine clues were in a poem inside which 2010 self-published memoir?

The Thrill of the Chase grew out of a 1988 cancer diagnosis: expecting to die, Fenn planned a treasure for others to find, then recovered and published the poem two decades later.

Which actor plays treasure hunter Ben Gates in Disney's National Treasure films?

Nicolas Cage's 2004 adventure drew mixed reviews, with critics calling its plot highly improbable, yet it took about $347 million worldwide and sent Gates back for a sequel.

Which liner's wreck did Robert Ballard find in 1985 during a secret US Navy mission to inspect two lost nuclear submarines?

Titanic: the Navy paid for Ballard's robot camera to survey the sunken submarines Thresher and Scorpion, and let him spend the days left over looking for the liner.

A hidden GPS cache vandalized or taken by an outsider is said to have been what?

Muggled borrows from Harry Potter: players call outsiders muggles, so a cache found and spoiled by one of them has been muggled.

In GPS cache-hunting slang, what does FTF celebrate?

First to Find is a bragging right: players race to sign a new cache's logbook before anyone else, and hiders sometimes leave a better prize for whoever gets there.

In 1854 a guide left a bottle for visitors' cards at a pool on which English moor, starting a stamp-hunting craze?

Dartmoor: James Perrott's bottle at Cranmere Pool caught on, and walkers still comb the moor for hidden stamps that prove they reached each spot.

Teams in the MIT Mystery Hunt race to find what hidden somewhere on campus?

A coin: the first hunt sent solvers after a hidden Indian head penny, and by tradition the winning team writes the next year's hunt.

In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Barbossa's crew is cursed for stealing which people's gold?

Aztec gold: the chest holds 882 pieces once paid to Cortés to stop his slaughter, and whoever takes one turns undead until every piece goes back with a blood offering.

In Channel 4's Treasure Hunt (1982–89), Anneka Rice dashed about by helicopter as the what?

Skyrunner was Anneka Rice's title: studio contestants directed her by radio as she raced between clues by helicopter, while newsreader Kenneth Kendall presented; the BBC revived the show with Suzi Perry in 2002.

Under the Treasure Act 1996, which official rules whether an English find counts as treasure?

A coroner: finders have 14 days to report possible treasure, and if the inquest rules that it qualifies, a museum gets the first chance to acquire it.

Which object is the most famous find from the Sutton Hoo ship burial?

A helmet: it came out of the ground in more than 100 rusted fragments and was pieced back together at the British Museum; the grave is thought to be King Rædwald's.

Which Dead Sea Scroll lists hiding places for gold and silver?

The Copper Scroll lists 64 hiding places; its metal was so corroded and brittle that it had to be sawn into strips in Manchester before anyone could read it.

The 1820 Treasure of Lima was allegedly buried on Cocos Island, off which country?

Costa Rica: Cocos Island lies about 550 km off its Pacific coast; in 1820 Captain William Thompson of the Mary Dear, entrusted with Lima's church wealth, turned pirate and supposedly buried it there.

Crates pulled from Austria's Lake Toplitz in 1959 held what Nazi hoard?

Counterfeit British banknotes: the forged pounds were made for Operation Bernhard, a scheme to sabotage Britain's economy, and were dumped in the lake as the war ended.

In 2015 two men claimed radar had found a buried Nazi 'gold train' in a tunnel in which country?

Poland: Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter said radar showed an armoured train near Wałbrzych, setting off a gold frenzy in the town; their 2016 dig found no train.

Edgar Allan Poe's cipher-cracking treasure tale The Gold-Bug is set on which bit of South Carolina?

Sullivan's Island, where Poe had served as a soldier at Fort Moultrie in 1827–28; the story won a $100 newspaper prize and became the most widely read of his tales in his lifetime.

In National Treasure (2004), Ben Gates steals which document to read a map on its back?

The Declaration of Independence: Gates steals it during a National Archives gala, reasoning that the only way to protect it from his rival Ian Howe is to take it first.

In Romancing the Stone (1984), the treasure El Corazón turns out to be what?

An emerald: a crocodile swallows El Corazón along with the villain's hand, and Jack later turns up with the sailboat it paid for, wearing boots made from the crocodile.

Which father and son both won Oscars for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a first for a single film?

John and Walter Huston: John won for directing and writing, and had cast his own father as the old prospector, the part that brought Walter Best Supporting Actor.

In It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, the stolen $350,000 is buried under what?

A big W: dying crook Smiler Grogan gasps to passing motorists that the $350,000 lies 'under a big W', which turns out to be four palm trees in Santa Rosita State Park.

Pirate La Buse supposedly flung a cryptogram into the crowd at his 1730 hanging on which island?

Réunion, then Île Bourbon, where Levasseur was hanged at Saint-Paul on 7 July 1730; his real haul was the Portuguese ship Nossa Senhora do Cabo, taken in 1721, and the necklace-and-cryptogram story is a 20th-century embellishment.

Galleon-salvager William Phips, knighted for his haul, became first royal governor of which colony?

Massachusetts: Phips was knighted for raising a fortune in silver from a Spanish wreck, became governor in 1692 and set up, then shut down, the Salem witch-trial court.

Whose funding for 'one more season' let Howard Carter find Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922?

Lord Carnarvon had been on the point of withdrawing his money after years of thin results; within months of the tomb's opening he was dead of an infected mosquito bite, and the 'curse' legend was born.

Where did Schliemann's 'Priam's Treasure' resurface after vanishing from Berlin in 1945?

Moscow: the gold was handed over at Berlin's Zoo flak tower and flown east, where it was kept secret for decades until the Pushkin Museum confirmed in the 1990s that it held it.

Which children's author wrote a partly fictional account of the 1942 Mildenhall Treasure find?

Roald Dahl read about the find in a newspaper, drove to Mildenhall to interview ploughman Gordon Butcher, sold the story to an American magazine and sent Butcher half the money.

The Cuerdale Hoard, a chest of silver dug up in Lancashire in 1840, was buried by which people?

Vikings buried it soon after they were driven out of Dublin in 902; the Ribble valley where it lay was their main route between the Irish Sea and York, and it may have been a war chest for retaking Dublin.

The 52,503 Roman coins of the 2010 Frome Hoard were found packed inside what?

A ceramic pot: its walls were too thin to carry such a weight, so it was probably set in the ground empty and the money poured in; finder Dave Crisp left it for archaeologists to lift in layers.

Who wrote, directed and starred in the BBC metal-detecting comedy Detectorists?

Mackenzie Crook plays Andy beside Toby Jones's Lance; the pair insist they are detectorists, since a metal detector is only the machine, which gave the BAFTA-winning series its name.

The Padmanabhaswamy Temple, where vaults opened in 2011 held a vast hoard of gold and precious stones, is in which country?

India: the Supreme Court ordered the Kerala temple's vaults opened in 2011, but one of them, Vault B, stayed sealed after astrologers warned against opening it.

Treasure rumours surround 19th-century priest Bérenger Saunière of which French hilltop village?

Rennes-le-Château, in the Aude: Saunière's lavish spending on the church, the Villa Bethania and the Tour Magdala in the early 1900s spawned theories of found treasure, though a 1910 church inquiry found he had been trafficking in masses.

Silver salvaged from the torpedoed SS Gairsoppa was struck into 20,000 coins in 2014 by which body?

The Royal Mint's issue closed a 73-year loop: the Gairsoppa was bringing the silver from Calcutta to Britain in 1941 when a U-boat sank her, leaving a single survivor.

All eleven ships of the 1715 treasure fleet from Havana sank in a hurricane off which US state?

Florida: a hurricane wrecked all eleven ships a week out of Havana, which is how the state's Treasure Coast got its name; Kip Wagner began pulling up their gold in 1961.

US courts made Odyssey Marine hand its 17-ton 'Black Swan' haul of silver to Spain because the wreck was what?

A warship: the silver came from the frigate Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, sunk by a British squadron in 1804, and a state's naval vessels keep sovereign immunity even on the seabed.

Divers proved a Cape Cod wreck was the pirate vessel Whydah by raising which object inscribed with its name?

The ship's bell, raised in 1985, settled it; Barry Clifford had found the wreck the year before by following a map drawn in 1717 by Cyprian Southack, the salvager sent to recover its treasure.

The Antikythera wreck, with its famous mechanism, was found in 1900 by divers hunting what?

Sponges: diver Elias Stadiatis surfaced babbling about rotting corpses and horses on the seabed; his captain suspected he was drunk on compressed air until a bronze arm came up from the wreck.

In Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), whose Golden Ticket is found first?

Augustus Gloop finds the first ticket and is also the first child off the tour, sucked up a pipe after falling into the chocolate river.

Disney's 2002 Treasure Planet reimagines Long John Silver as what?

Billy Bones crash-lands a spaceship at Jim Hawkins's inn with a sphere holding a star map and a warning to 'beware the cyborg'.

What is the name of the schooner that carries Jim Hawkins to the island in Treasure Island?

The Hispaniola is bought at Bristol by Squire Trelawney and sails under Captain Smollett; Jim later paddles out alone in a coracle and cuts her adrift, and the mutineers lose their ship.

In Treasure Island, what job does the one-legged Long John Silver hold aboard the treasure-hunting schooner?

Sea cook: the author first called the book The Sea Cook, after Silver, and its magazine serial of 1881–82 was credited to 'Captain George North'.

The 'Dutchman' of Arizona's Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine, Jacob Waltz, was an immigrant from where?

Germany: in Waltz's day 'Dutchman' was an ordinary American word for a German, which is how a German prospector's supposed mine in the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix got a Dutch name.

Which country's Orthodox Church claims to keep the Ark of the Covenant in a chapel at Axum?

Ethiopia: the Ark is said to rest in the Chapel of the Tablet beside the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, where only its guardian monk may look at it.

The 2009 Anglo-Saxon gold find near Lichfield lay in which ancient kingdom when it was buried?

Mercia: the field lay in the kingdom's heartland, and nearly every piece is war gear, much of it fittings stripped from swords, which is why it reads as a warrior's hoard.

Heinrich Schliemann dug into the mound at Hisarlik in the 1870s, on Frank Calvert's advice, in search of which legendary city?

Troy: Calvert, whose family owned part of the mound, had begun digging there seven years before Schliemann arrived, yet he was never officially credited with the discovery.

Which future queen, as a girl, described an Easter egg hunt staged by her mother, the Duchess of Kent?

Queen Victoria kept the custom going: as queen she recorded Prince Albert hiding coloured eggs in the moss for their own children.

Which Michigan brothers led the Nova Scotia 'Money Pit' dig shown on History from 2014?

Rick and Marty Lagina bought half of the company that owns the island in 2006; Rick had been hooked since reading about the pit in a 1965 Reader's Digest.