Nova Scotia’s infamous “Death Coast” is the most treacherous stretch of the North Atlantic, with a staggering estimate of 25,000 shipwrecks—the highest concentration in North and South America. THE DEATH COAST (8×60) is a gripping new Canadian docuseries following Cape Breton’s Captain Jeff MacKinnon, a third-generation shipwreck salvager, and his elite team of ex-FBI, military, and police divers who risk everything to uncover lost artifacts and hidden treasure beneath the rough waters of the North Atlantic. The series premieres on Tuesday, Apr. 8 at 9 p.m. ET on USA Network, with new episodes streaming next day on Crave, beginning Wednesday, Apr. 9.
With access to 5,000 recorded wrecks in the Marine Heritage Database, in the premiere episode, Jeff and his team set their sights on Le Chameau, an 18th-century French cargo ship rumored to have sunk with a fortune in rare coins. Armed with a 300-year-old map, they race against time—and the ocean’s unforgiving elements—to uncover its long-lost treasure before another storm buries it forever.
Captain Jeff MacKinnon is a third-generation shipwreck recoverist and owns the only license to dive on thousands of shipwrecks which now rest on the seafloor of Cape Breton’s perilous coast. At 14, Jeff started working with his father, Robert Mackinnon, one of the most famed and successful shipwreck salvagers on the Atlantic coast. Robert has discovered several of Cape Breton’s most profitable treasure shipwrecks and recovered from them coins as valuable as $200,000 USD each, as well as artifacts which can be seen in museums across the world. Jeff joined his father’s team and assisted him in the lab, conserving recovered artifacts and working with the foremost expert archeologists, geologists, and survey technicians in the field. During this time, Jeff learned his father’s methods of recovery and developed his own highly specialized technique of preserving artifacts, which lead to the formation of his own salvaging team.
All artifacts recovered during the filming of THE DEATH COAST are returned to the Nova Scotia Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage, Special Places Protection.