The Beyond Oak Island Crew Made MILLIONS On NEW Shipwreck Treasure

You’re going to learn some things, aren’t you? You will learn things like you have never learned before.

The Arabia tells the story of the 1850s and the settlers coming west.

What do you get when you mix the grit of the Oak Island hunters with a confirmed multi-million dollar shipwreck? You get the single greatest discovery of pioneer era treasure in history.

The team uncovered a buried steamboat, but it’s what was inside that shocked even the experts. A treasure hunt with a guarantee.

For what feels like a lifetime, we’ve been on the edge of our seats watching Rick and Marty Lena and their dedicated team pour their heart, souls, and millions of dollars into a cold, mysterious island in Nova Scotia.

Oak Island. The name itself whispers of pirate curses, Templar gold, and secrets buried so deep they might never see the light of day.

It’s a hunt fueled by hope, by whispers in history, and by the tantalizing pull of the unknown.

Every piece of wood, every strange coin is a victory. But it’s a slow, hard-one battle against water, mud, and time itself.

But what if you could go on a treasure hunt where you knew the treasure was there? What if you knew exactly what you were looking for? And the only question was how to get to it.

A dive knife down there and they can use that to kind of make spots in the mud.

That’s the incredible story the Beyond Oak Island crew stumbled upon. A story that redefines the very idea of treasure.

This isn’t about chasing legends. It’s about recovering a whole world that was lost in an instant.

This is the story of a ghost ship, not found at sea, but in the most unbelievable place you could ever imagine. A farmer’s corn field in the heart of America.

The men behind this miracle are David Holly and his family. They aren’t hunting for pirate gold. They found something much, much bigger.

They located the steamboat Arabia, a giant of the Missouri River that vanished in 1856 with 222 tons of cargo.

The value, millions and millions of dollars. But its real worth is so much more.

It’s worth millions and millions of dollars. The collection itself. It has to be.

Yeah. This isn’t just a treasure. It’s a time machine.

The Oak Island team has spent years searching for a single chest, but the Holl’s found an entire floating department store perfectly preserved.

But how on earth do you even begin to look for a 171 ft long ship that the river swallowed whole more than 130 years ago?

The story of the Arabia is a dramatic one.

The Arabia tells a story of the 1850s and the settlers coming west.

On September 5th, 1856, she was chugging her way up the powerful Missouri River, a modern marvel carrying everything needed for life on the frontier.

She was loaded with supplies for 16 towns destined to stock the shelves of general stores for the coming winter.

But just 6 miles from Kansas City, disaster struck.

The powerful current slammed the Arabia into a huge hidden tree snag.

The tree’s sharp branches tore right through the boat’s wooden hull like a can opener.

It all happened in minutes.

The giant ship sank so fast that the only thing lost was a single mule left tied to the deck.

The ship and all its precious cargo was gone, swallowed by the river’s murky depths and buried under tons of mud and silt.

For over a century, the Arabia was just a memory, a ghost on the river.

But the Missouri River is a restless thing.

Over the decades, it changed its course, carving a new path through the land.

This is where David Holly’s incredible journey begins.

He didn’t have a mysterious coded map like the one tied to Oak Island’s 90 ft stone.

He had something better. Old river charts.

By comparing maps from 1856 to modern ones, he made a shocking discovery.

The place where the Arabia sank was no longer a river.

It was now half a mile from the water, sitting right in the middle of a peaceful cornfield.

With the farmers okay, the search began in 1988.

Imagine that. Walking back and forth, row after row, in a huge cornfield.

It sounds crazy, but David had a special tool, a powerful metal detector called a magnetometer.

He walked for what felt like forever, the machine humming, searching for a giant metal ghost.

The boat was there, buried deep under the ground.

To be sure, they brought in a giant drill.

They drilled down again and again for a whole week, trying to find the front, the back, and the sides of the ship.

Once they knew its exact location, they marked its outline on the field with white chalk.

For the first time in over a hundred years, the shape of the mighty Arabia lay there, a giant phantom in the dirt.

Finding the boat was a miracle.

But it was lying under 45 ft of mud, sand, and soil far below the water table.

Now came the real challenge.

How do you dig up a massive, fragile wooden ship without it all falling apart?

Digging up a regular treasure chest is hard enough, but digging up a 171 ft long wooden steamboat buried under a cornfield is a challenge on a whole other level.

The Holly family knew they had a huge problem.

The boat was deep underground and the ground was full of water.

The moment they started digging, the hole would just fill up with water, turning into a giant mud pit.

This is a problem the Oak Island team knows all too well with their money pit flooding over and over.

But David had a plan.

To succeed, they had to dig in the winter.

Why the winter? Because in the cold, the groundwater level of the Missouri River is at its lowest.

It was their only shot.

So on November 13th, 1988, the massive project began.

They brought in huge cranes and bulldozers.

They dug a giant hole around the ship’s chalk outline, a hole the size of a football field.

To keep the water out, they set up a ring of 20 powerful wells, each with a pump running day and night, non-stop.

These pumps were pulling out an incredible 20,000 gallons of water every single minute just to keep the site from flooding.

The cold was bitter, but the team worked on.

Day after day, they dug deeper, removing the earth that had kept the Arabia secret for so long.

Four months they dug through the freezing Missouri winter.

Slowly, miraculously, the top of the boat began to appear.

The wooden deck, the huge paddle wheels, the boilers, it was all there, caked in mud, but whole.

It was an incredible sight, a ghost ship rising from the earth.

The lack of oxygen in the thick mud had protected it from rotting away.

It was a perfect time capsule.

As they finally broke through the deck and into the cargo hold, no one was prepared for what they were about to find.

They expected rotten crates and rusted tools.

What they found was a treasure that would stun the world, a treasure beyond gold.

When the team finally opened the cargo hold of the Arabia, it was like stepping into another time.

The darkness and mud had created a perfect oxygen-free seal, preserving everything inside.

This wasn’t a treasure of gold coins and jewels.

It was something far more valuable.

A perfectly preserved slice of life from 1856.

What they found was mindblowing.

There were big wooden barrels.

And when they opened one, they found pickles inside.

Green, crunchy pickles that were still perfectly edible after more than 130 years.

They found jars of pie fillings still sweet and ready to be baked.

They found barrels of butter that still smelled fresh.

The finds just kept coming.

They uncovered stacks of beautiful dishes and plates imported all the way from England without a single chip on them.

They found tools of every kind, guns and knives for the pioneers heading west, still sharp and ready for use.

There was clothing of all types, durable work pants, fancy hats, and delicate fabrics.

In all, they found 4,000 boots and shoes, all brand new.

Unlike the strange coconut fibers found deep in the Oak Island money pit, which remain a mystery, this was a complete collection that told a clear story.

It was the inventory of a frontier department store locked away from the world.

While the Oak Island team has found fascinating but isolated artifacts like the mysterious lead cross from Smith’s Cove, the Arabia offered a complete picture.

There were cases of champagne, cognac, and gin, the bottles still sealed, and the liquid inside perfectly aged.

They found buttons, perfume, books, building supplies, and even children’s toys.

It was everything a growing country needed, a snapshot of the dreams and demands of the people building America.

Each object was a direct link to the past, a tangible piece of history you could hold in your hand.

At first, the family thought about selling some of it.

The collection was obviously worth millions and millions of dollars.

But as they brought up each new incredible item, that idea started to fade away.

They realized they hadn’t just found a treasure.

They had rescued a story.

And that story was too important to be broken up and sold.

What do you do when you have 222 tons of priceless historical artifacts that you’ve promised not to sell?

You do something even more amazing.

You share it with the world.

The Holly family decided that this incredible collection couldn’t just sit in a warehouse.

It belonged to everyone.

They made a bold choice.

Instead of cashing in, they poured even more of their own money into creating a museum.

And they did it on a timeline that would make your head spin.

The excavation began on November 13th, 1988.

Exactly 3 years later to the day, on November 13th, 1991, the Steamboat Arabia Museum opened its doors in Kansas City.

Walking into that museum is an experience the Beyond Oak Island crew would never forget.

It’s one thing to hear about it, but it’s another to see it.

The first thing you see isn’t just a few items in glass cases.

You walk onto a full-sized reconstruction of the Arabia’s main deck.

You are standing on the boat.

The giant boilers are where they used to be.

The massive 200 foot long paddle wheel is there in all its glory.

It gives you a real idea of just how huge this ship was.

Then you go into the collection itself.

It’s like walking through a giant general store from the 1850s.

Room after room is filled with the treasures, not locked away, but displayed as they would have been on the shelves, waiting for customers.

Thousands of boots lined up, stacks of English china, tools, clothes, bottles of champagne.

It’s all there.

It’s stunning.

You can walk a football field’s length past perfectly preserved artifacts.

It gives a whole new meaning to the word treasure.

Experts have said the collection is worth millions and millions of dollars.

It has to be.

But the family has never once thought about selling it.

They say the items are like their children.

You just don’t sell your children.

They have given the world a real treasure, a gift of pure history.

But for these treasure hunters, the story doesn’t end with one ship.

For the Hollies, the Arabia was just the first chapter.

Their next target is even older, and its story is shrouded in an even deeper mystery.

For most people, discovering the Arabia would be the achievement of a lifetime.

A find that big, a story that perfect is more than anyone could ever hope for.

But for David Holly and his team, it was just the beginning.

The Arabia tells the amazing story of the 1850s, of settlers pushing west to build new lives.

But that’s just one decade.

Their dream is to find and recover six different steamboats, one for each decade of the great steamboat era from the 1820s to the 1870s.

Together, these boats would tell the complete story of how the American West was built.

Their next target is a ship that makes the Arabia seem almost modern.

It’s a steamboat called the Malta.

The Malta sank in 1841, a full 15 years before the Arabia went down.

It was on a very different mission.

It wasn’t carrying supplies for settlers.

It was heading up river with a cargo of trade goods for the Native American tribes of the frontier.

This treasure is from an even earlier, wilder time in American history.

What kind of tools did they use? What kind of goods were being traded?

The answers to those questions are buried with the Malta.

Finding it will be just as hard, if not harder, than finding the Arabia.

The Missouri River has had another 15 years to move and hide its secrets.

But the Hollies are determined.

They are already piecing together the clues, studying the old maps, and getting ready for the next great hunt.

The Beyond Oak Island crew was fascinated by this next chapter.

It’s a treasure hunt with an incredible goal, not just to find one treasure, but to build a library of history, with each sunken ship as a new volume in the story.

Another ship they have their eyes on is the Radner.

It was carrying military supplies to Fort Levvenworth.

A huge story about the army on the frontier.

Each boat is a different piece of the puzzle.

It’s not just a story about steamboats.

It’s the story of the development of the whole West.

While the Lagginas continue their search for a single legendary vault.

The Holl are planning an entire fleet of historical recoveries.

The Arabia was real, massive, and found.

So why has Oak Island yielded so little?

Could the legend be a lie?

Let us know.

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