Tanneyhill Is The Key To Solving The Mystery Of Netflix’s Outer Banks

Netflix's new teen drama Outer Banks is about the haves and have nots who live in the yes, you guessed it, Outer Banks. John B. Routledge (Chase Stokes) is the leader of the have nots, better known as the Pogues, who is determined to find the buried treasure his dad was searching for before he disappeared. So perhaps it shouldn't be all that surprising that the key to finding the riches leads him straight to Tanneyhill. But what is Tanneyhill on Outer Banks?

Well, it's the fanciest home on the barrier islands off of North Carolina and also where John B.'s adversary turned crush Sarah Cameron (Madelyn Cline) lives. The sprawling plantation home was founded by Denmark Tanney, a free man who bought the cotton plantation using gold.

Tanney's portrait hangs in Sarah's dad Ward's (Charles Esten) study, but she admits no one is quite sure where he came from. However, John B. realises if Tanney paid for the land in gold that likely means he was a survivor of the Royal Merchant, a ship that sunk off the coast of the Outer Banks in the late 1800s with $400 million in British gold on it.

That was also the ship John B.'s dad Big John was after. He believed there were no known survivors from the accident and that the gold had likely gone down with the ship. But if Tanney was in possession of the gold, he is likely the key to finding out where it is now.

When Sarah's family moved into the home they donated Tanney's diary, almanac and papers to The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's archives. In those papers, John B. finds a letter that Tanney wrote to his son the same day he was killed by lynching. The note, written in Gullah, the language of the African Americans who live in the Lowcountry, asks his son to harvest the wheat in parcel nine.

Tilling the field seems like a strange dying wish, but John B. realises that it's code: Wheat is slang for British gold; it's the symbol embossed on the gold bars. Parcel nine on the Tanney plantation, which once covered most of the island, is where the gold is hidden. Now John B. and his friends just have to figure out where parcel 9 is.