Treasure Hunts
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97 free Treasure Hunts trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
50 free treasure hunts trivia questions with answers. Are you ready to embark on an adventure of knowledge? Our treasure hunt trivia quiz features 50 engaging questions covering famous treasure hunts, exploration history, and adventure lore from around the world. Test your expertise and discover how much you really know about the thrill of the hunt.
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Q 01Before hiding his treasure chest, Forrest Fenn made his fortune as what?
Art dealer
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.
Q 02Who wrote the classic adventure novel 'Treasure Island'?
Robert Louis Stevenson
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.
Q 03Which pirate captured the French slave ship La Concorde in 1717 and renamed it Queen Anne's Revenge?
Blackbeard
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.
Q 04What outdoor activity involves using a GPS receiver or mobile device to find hidden containers?
Geocaching
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.
Q 05Which Spanish treasure galleon, lost in a 1622 hurricane, did Mel Fisher's divers finally find in 1985?
Nuestra Señora de Atocha
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.
Q 06Which spot off Nova Scotia has drawn treasure hunters for over two centuries with tales of a 'Money Pit'?
Oak Island
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.
Q 07In the 1985 film The Goonies, what legendary pirate's treasure are the children searching for?
One-Eyed Willy
One-Eyed Willy's map sends the Goonies underground after his hoard, their one hope of saving their families' homes from foreclosure.
Q 08The legendary lost city of gold, El Dorado, was believed to be located in which continent?
South America
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.
Q 09What was the common name for the Spanish silver dollar linked to pirate treasure?
Piece of Eight
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'.
Q 10In April 1945 US troops found the Reichsbank's gold hidden in what at Merkers?
Salt mine
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.
Q 11Which navigator's instrument uses two mirrors to measure the angle between the horizon and the sun or a star?
Sextant
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.
Q 12What map feature shows the cardinal directions and their intermediate points, often drawn as a star?
Compass Rose
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.
Q 13In which US state was the first GPS-located cache, a bucket holding a logbook and a slingshot, hidden in May 2000?
Oregon
Q 21Which 2009 metal-detector find is the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver ever discovered?
Staffordshire Hoard
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.
Q 22Which instrument is the 10th-century scholar al-Sufi said to have described more than 1,000 uses for?
Astrolabe
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.
Q 23Kit Williams' 1979 picture book Masquerade sent Britain digging for what jewelled prize he had buried?
A golden hare
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.
Q 14Well-digging farmers in 1974 uncovered the Terracotta Army guarding which emperor's tomb?
Qin Shi Huang
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.
Q 15What was a civilian ship licensed by its government to attack enemy shipping in wartime called?
Privateer
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.
Q 16What is the general term for goods or valuables taken by force, especially during war or robbery?
Plunder
Plunder was picked up by English speakers during the Thirty Years' War; the word behind it had first meant nothing worse than household goods.
Q 17Which outdoor hobby mixes orienteering, art and puzzle solving, often using rubber stamps?
Letterboxing
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.
Q 18Which three encrypted texts supposedly locate treasure buried in Bedford County, Virginia, around 1820?
The Beale Ciphers
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.
Q 19In Treasure Island, what marks the buried treasure on Captain Flint's map?
Red crosses
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.
Q 20In which state was Forrest Fenn's Rocky Mountain treasure chest eventually found?
Wyoming
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.
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.
Q 24Which historical figure is often associated with seeking the legendary 'Fountain of Youth'?
Juan Ponce de León
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.
Q 25What is the study of creating and breaking codes and ciphers?
Cryptography
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.
Q 26In trail marking, what is the term for a mark slashed or painted on a tree to show the route?
Blaze
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.
Q 27What is the nautical term for a measurement of water depth, equal to six feet?
Fathom
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.
Q 28What type of map uses contour lines connecting points of equal elevation?
Topographic map
A topographic map's contour lines connect points of equal elevation, so closely packed lines mean steep ground.
Q 29Which pirate captained the Whydah Gally when it sank off Cape Cod in 1717?
Samuel Bellamy
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.
Q 30In espionage, what is passing items via a secret location so two agents never meet called?
Dead drop
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.