Many stories about vast treasures have been filmed with the main idea of thrilling the audience with clues that the protagonists discover and decipher, sometime accomplished legally. National Treasure 1 and 2 are such movies with the protagonist Benjamin Franklin Gates(Nicolas Cage) ingeniously finds the clues to treasures that were found centuries before his time.

In the first installment of the National Treasure, the reward was the Templar treasure. Supposedly, this treasure was a collection of each kingdom that conquered one another dating back to the Babylonian times. It was passed from one conqueror to another, increasing cumulatively and like all treasures, vanishing instantly. The Crusaders during the war to reclaim the holy land, supposedly have found the treasure but deemed that no single person was worthy for such wealth and decided to hide it. The last clue that remained intact was handed down to Thomas Gates, great-great-grandfather of Ben Gates. The clue just tells them “The secret lies with Charlotte”. When Ben turns into an adult, he discovers the Charlotte, a ship that sunk somewhere in the Arctic but the sea experienced hurricane-force ice storms that made the sea freeze and melt and refreeze. It essentially created a part of the sea to move to another place and become permafrost there. Inside the ship, they found another clue which leads them to a map behind the Declaration of Independence. Ben was against the idea of stealing the said document which was why Ian Howe, his financier, turned against him. The protagonist narrowly escaped him and set out to stop.