NT

An Unofficial Fan Tribute · Est. By Believers in Page 47

NATIONALTREASURE

They were the most powerful men of their age. They hid the greatest treasure in human history under our feet. We’re going to find it. Or at least catalog the trivia.

Begin the HuntDecode the Cipher

The Canon

The Films

Two films. One canon. We focus on the original two-film saga.

2004

National Treasure

The greatest adventure history has ever revealed.

Benjamin Franklin Gates, the latest in a long line of treasure hunters chasing a Templar hoard whispered into the family by a dying carriage driver named Thomas Gates, follows a chain of clues from the wreck of a colonial freighter buried in Arctic ice to the back of the Declaration of Independence itself. With FBI agents, a duplicitous benefactor, and a skeptical archivist named Dr. Abigail Chase all closing in, Ben does the only sensible thing a Gates ever does: he steals the Declaration to protect it. What follows is a chase through Philadelphia, New York, and the bones beneath Trinity Church — and a quiet argument about whether the country itself is the treasure.

Key Artifacts

  • The Charlotte (a colonial freighter found in the Arctic)
  • The meerschaum pipe stem with engraved cipher
  • The Silence Dogood letters
  • The Declaration of Independence
  • The Ottendorf cipher
Read more →

2007

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

History's greatest secret. America's greatest legend.

When a missing page from the diary of John Wilkes Booth surfaces in the hands of one Mitch Wilkinson, Thomas Gates is named as a co-conspirator in the Lincoln assassination. To clear his great-great-grandfather's name, Ben follows a trail of presidents and their twin desks from the Library of Congress to Buckingham Palace, from Mount Vernon to a chamber inside Mount Rushmore. The trail ends at Cibola, the lost Olmec city of gold, which is also (per Ben Gates' standard operating procedure) about to flood. Along the way, he kidnaps the President.

Key Artifacts

  • John Wilkes Booth's missing diary page
  • The twin Resolute desks (London and Washington)
  • The President's Book of Secrets
  • The Eagle of Cibola plank from Mount Vernon
  • The carved noisemaker / wooden plank treasure map
Read more →

The Puzzle

The Cipher Vault

This is an Ottendorf cipher. Numbers refer to specific words in a key text. Find the right text and you find the message. Yes, we made one. No, we won’t tell you which page.

The Triplets

  • 011·1·1
  • 022·1·1
  • 032·2·1
  • 043·1·1
  • 053·2·1

Three numbers. Paragraph, sentence, word. Apply them to the words on this page. Take the first letter of each word you land on. Read in order.

Decode the triplets. Reveal what is hidden.

The Archive

Lore & Legend

Templars, Freemasons, ciphers, kings. The history they don’t print in the textbooks — because the ones with the textbooks were also the ones with the gold.

All Lore Entries →

The Margins

Easter Eggs

The frames worth pausing on. The lines worth quoting at parties.

  • NT · 2004

    The Library of Congress Card Catalog

    Ben and Riley sneak through the Library of Congress and Ben dives — actual dive — into a sliding card catalog drawer to escape the FBI. The gag is built on the very real fact that, in the early 2000s, the Library of Congress still maintained physical card catalogs as a backup. The catalog cabinets are wider than they look on screen. Filming required a custom prop slightly larger than the originals, and Nicolas Cage absolutely refused a stunt double for the slide.

  • NT · 2004

    The Marshall Field's Shopping Cart

    After stealing the Declaration of Independence, Ben needs to look completely un-suspicious leaving the Archives gala. He acquires the document, leaves through the rotunda, and gets into a shopping cart full of department-store bags from Marshall Field's so that he reads as a particularly nervous Christmas shopper rather than a particularly nervous national-document thief. The bags read 'Field's' on screen for about three seconds, which is the entire reason a generation of fans now associates Chicago department-store branding with treasure hunting.

  • Book of Secrets · 2007

    Riley's Red Ferrari

    After the events of National Treasure, Riley Poole gets one percent of the treasure as a finder's fee, which works out to enough money to never work again. He buys a red Ferrari. The Ferrari appears in the second film as Riley's primary mode of transportation and primary source of complaint, since it has been recently impounded for unpaid taxes. The bit pays off twice — once on its appearance, once when Riley loses it again.

  • Book of Secrets · 2007

    Riley's 'Page 47' Book

    Riley writes a tell-all book after the first film called The Templar Treasure: A History (working subtitle: National Treasure: Page 47, depending on which licensing materials you read). It sells poorly. In the second film, Riley does a book signing at which exactly one person buys a copy and asks Riley to sign it 'to my dad.' It is the kindest small humiliation the franchise contains. Riley still drives the Ferrari.

All Easter Eggs →