The Curse of Oak Island: Substantial Find Uncovered at Smith’s Cove (Season 6) | History

Look at that.
Pretty cool, eh?

Yeah, it is massive.

NARRATOR: OR: Marty Lagid, his business partner.
The tester arrives at Smith.

“Hey guys, how are you?”
“Good.”
“You both got it?”
“Pretty much.”
“Pretty much done.”
“So pretty quick, we’ll be able to remove it, and then we get over to that stuff, and then we can excavate.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, exactly. It’s going to be interesting to get un.”

NARRATOR: Now, the entire slipway is exposed. Archaeologist Laird Niven will photograph and meticulously record details of the structure.
The team will then carefully disassemble it in order to search beneath it for artifacts or possible clues.

“You can see it on the other side?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, at low tide, it’s visible.”
“[inaudible]”
“Yeah, it’s pretty much a slipway, certainly. We’re used to it.”
“For hauling—just hauling up your little fishing stuff.”
“It’s a lot larger.”
“Yeah.”
“The other thing is, they’re really too far apart. To haul a ship up, you’d need one every three or four.”
“Well, yeah, but a cart full of goods, you’d need them every—?”
“Just to strengthen it?”
“Yes, because the wheels would be way closer together.”
“I guess my question is, why use a slipway instead of a wharf?”
“So, there are some people who feel they want to keep things simple, almost no prof.”
“So it’s very—very low profile.”

NARRATOR: Is it possible that the slipway was a sort of secret wharf, not for docking, but as a ramp to offload something onto Oak Island?
And if so, what else might the team find buried beneath this mysterious structure?

The slipway is clearly a massive structure.
It appears to be quite old.
Doesn’t have a lot of iron in it.
It clearly looks like it was used to load or unload something for this island.
Well, a whole bunch of somebodies thought this was really important.
It’s pretty much the biggest mystery, isn’t it?
It’s a massive undertaking. There are hardly any details, and the majority is actually coming from here, as Gary suspected.

“We’re going to dig a little deeper?”
“Yeah.”
“—and see what you find.”
“No, absolutely.”
“Alright, let’s keep going.”
“Alright, carry on, man. Talk to you later.”

NARRATOR: Archaeologist Laird Niven begins to carefully dig beneath the slipway.
Drayton continues his metal-detection search.

“[beeping]”
“Here we go. Hmm, interesting.”
“That looks like a hinge.”
“What’s a hinge doing there?”
“It’s not gold, but interesting—almost like an old wrought-iron hinge.”
“That is cool.”
“What do you make of that?”
“That’s nice.”
“I don’t know if it’s a door, a chest, or what, but it’s a substantial hinge.”
“What I make of that is that it’s old.”
“How old?”
“I can give you a couple of very rough guesses. It might even be very, very old.”
“Really?”

NARRATOR: An iron hinge possibly from a chest, and found more than six feet deep beneath the seabed?
Could it have been part of a container used to bring something of great value onto Oak Island centuries ago?

“You can imagine the time that went into that.”
“I mean, that is cool.”
“It is cool.”
“Do you think that’s a square hole?”
“It’s tough to tell, the way it angles.”
“But this looks broken off at the end here.”
“Yeah.”
“So it had to be at least this long. I mean, that’s a huge piece to put on even a chest.”
“Looks like there’s more out there somewhere.”
“Yeah.”

“So, it really opens the door to finding something.”
“Yep.”
“Well, one thing’s for sure. We can bring this for compositional analysis.”
“The hinge Gary found was very interesting.”
“It did look very old.”
“I mean, the metal itself looks like it was hammered at some point in time, in layers.”
“So we can find experts that might tell us what it was, what time period it was from.”
“So we just got to follow up on that.”

“Alright, mate, let’s try and find whatever’s associated with it.”
“That’s pretty cool.”
“It is.”