The notorious pirate Blackbeard, famous for setting light to his beard when terrorising ships has been mentioned in connection with Oak Island. The only viable reason to link Blackbeard with the location is that he would often boast of an underground hoard where he would store his treasure.

He claimed it was in a place “where none but Satan and myself can find it.” This certainly sounds like the Money Pit but there is little evidence to place Blackbeard in the Nova Scotia region, having conducted no operations north of Delaware.

If Oak Island was a communal bank for pirates, each band could dig tunnels off the Money Pit shaft and bury their treasure. Retrieval of such could have involved digging vertically down to claim their cache.