Shocking End to a Historic Season (Season 12) | The Curse of Oak Island

-See we’re ready to rock and roll.
-SCOTT: Today’s the day.
-ALEX: Airlift time.

NARRATOR:
A year that has been full of historic discoveries and revelations on Oak Island is about to reach its culmination for brothers Rick and Marty Lagina and their team.

NARRATOR:
In the fabled Money Pit area, the team has now installed their sixth and final seven-foot-diameter steel shaft for the year. A shaft they have dubbed “the one thing” or “TOT-1.”

It has reached some 195 feet underground and penetrated a massive natural cavity in the bedrock, known as the solution channel. A cavity that contains more than 100 tons of earth and debris that collapsed into it during one of the team’s recent excavations and which may now also contain the legendary Money Pit treasure.

RICK:
There still could be something down at the bottom of that caisson. And they’re gonna vacuum it up literally, and we’re gonna look in there and we’re gonna hope we find the one thing.

-Today’s the day we find Rick’s one thing.
-MARTY: Let’s go, yeah.
-Mickey, you all connected up?
-Yeah.
-You good, Denny?
-Yeah. We’re gonna fire that pump up.
-RICK: Here we go.
-ALEX: It’s going. Rough start. There you go.
-MARTY: Oh, baby! There it is, there it is.
-ADAM: Lots of muck, buddy.

RICK:
The weather’s closing in, our time here on the island is closing. The expectations are high that within the TOT-1, “the one thing” caisson, that some significant discoveries will be made.

NARRATOR:
Later that afternoon…

-GARY: We got a busy day ahead of us.
-CRAIG: Yes, we do.
-Quite a mess you made down here, Bill.
-Isn’t it?

NARRATOR:
Rick, Craig and Gary Drayton arrive at Smith’s Cove to begin searching the TOT-1 spoils.

RICK:
Now it’s had a chance to dry off. So we have a little chance for a better visual. I believe today we’re gonna find a diamond in the rough, right in that pile there.

Okay. You got two guys to shovel. You get the metal detector. Billy, if you can scrape that off?

-All right.
-Let’s get stuck in.

(metal detector whining)
-Got a good signal.
-Hey. Looks like I’m just in time.
-Something good, Gary?
-GARY: Yeah. It sounds good.
-MARTY: Let me know if you need to dig.
-Yeah. Got to do the honors.
-MARTY: Right there?
-GARY: Yep. Right underneath that pile there.
-All right. I’ll have a regroup. And a pinpoint. See where this is.
-Ooh, ooh!
-Wow!
-Something.
-GARY: Yeah! That’s nice. It’s the end of a pick by the look of it.
-So, it is.
-Yep. But it’s in great condition.
-It’s heavy for its size.
-RICK: It’s very small.
-That’s what I like about it. If you’re tunneling you’d need a little pick like that.
-Tunneling, not shafts.
-GARY: Yep.
-Wouldn’t it be ironic if it’s a match to that old tool that we found in TOT-1?
-Yes. Yeah.

NARRATOR:
Part of a pickax? What is that? It looks like it’s part of a tool.

One week ago, while searching spoils that came from more than 160 feet deep in the TOT-1 shaft, Gary and Marty found a fragment of another pickax.

GARY:
That could be a really old tool, mate.

MARTY:
Yeah.

NARRATOR:
One that blacksmithing expert Carmen Legge believed to have been used for tunneling and may date as far back as the 16th century.

RICK:
I see a little bit of… striation right here.

NARRATOR:
Could this be a similar tool? If so, was it possibly used by someone who deposited something of great value in the original Money Pit?

There’s a lot more to go through but we’re running out of time in every sense of the word. For the moment, for the year.

RICK:
I think we’re gonna have to get the rest of the team to have a meeting in the war room, talk about what we did, what we got to do, what our hopes and expectations are.

It’s an enormous amount of material. I wish we had more time to search. However, we will finish this work next summer and it’s typical Oak Island in terms of making what could be a significant find at the end of the year.

What it’s saying is you just got to keep going.

NARRATOR:
The following afternoon…

MARTY:
Hey, guys. Here we be.

-Wow!
-Hey! (overlapping greetings)

MARTY:
I am always overwhelmed when I walk into this group. And today is no exception.

NARRATOR:
Rick, Marty and Craig gather for the final time this year with their fellowship in the Oak Island Museum.

MARTY:
I’m a bit humbled and I’m in a bit of awe of the amount of brainpower and discoveries as I walk into that room.

You know, there’s a bunch of happy faces and interested people. And they’re our team. They’re our team.

RICK:
You know, I’ll use a Gary Drayton term. Gobsmacked. I mean, it’s quite remarkable to see how many people all gathered together to do one thing. Solve this mystery.

Uh, with that, I think we can transition to our favorite spot, the Money Pit. So let’s go there.

And we got two really interesting artifacts. And I’ll turn it over to Emma to describe them.

EMMA:
Well, these two pieces. So I think we were calling this piece a chisel, from the Money Pit spoils.

RICK:
Yeah.

EMMA:
And then a pick.

-This giant piece.
-MARTY: Yeah.
-EMMA: So I scanned the artifacts, and they are both quite clean irons. They’re actually very similar in composition. And I would give a date range on the artifacts.

They are at least early to mid-1700s. Potentially… before that.

RICK:
How far back?

EMMA:
They could go back to the 1650s. They have a consistent potassium content, which indicates, like, a charcoaled manufacturing process, which would have been phased out in the mid-1700s.

MARTY:
We now have proof that people were down there way before discovery. Just that this year lends credence to all the stories about the Money Pit…

-Yeah.
-…and credence to why we first set foot on this island.
-So that would be a smoking hot find.
-(laughter)
-MARTY: Yes. Exactly. Smoking hot find.

We were able to put down six large canisters in the Money Pit this year, uh, successfully. Uh, we didn’t find treasure, per se. But I think we found treasure in the sense of a lot of knowledge that’s gonna help us proceed.

-STEVE: Yeah.
-ALEX: I went into the year thinking that there’s no possible way that if there’s treasure down there that we could’ve missed it with the 600-some boreholes that we put in the ground– whatever the number is.

**-Yeah.
-But when we did the caisson work and everything started collapsing down into the solution channel, that explains why we might have missed it.

And so I think the odds, in my mind, of there still being something underground in the Money Pit are a lot higher.

NARRATOR:
For over ten years now, the Laginas and Craig Tester have researched excavation methods to explore a much larger region of the Money Pit area.

One of these is the so-called honeycomb process. This would involve digging a series of eight-foot-diameter steel shafts next to one another down to depths of as much as 230 feet, allowing the team to thoroughly search the solution channel for the legendary treasure.

RICK:
I asked you at the beginning of the year to inspire each other, to do something which is more than each of us individually, and that is working as a team, working as a unit, working… together.

Look at the table. Look around. You know, as a little boy, I, um… I believed in Oak Island– in the mystery, in the story, and in the treasure. And, uh, I believe it now.

But the thing that is really quite compelling for me is that… Um…

-Mm.
-You can do it.
-Yeah, I know.
-(chuckling)

RICK:
It has been… one of the greatest pleasures… (crying softly) …of my life… (shudders) to not only have shared this with all of you… but with my two nephews and David, who is not here, and my brother, of course. It’s been… fantastic. So, thank you. Thank you.

MARTY:
Hey, look, I’ve always said this– and I’m sure of this– it’s impossible to follow a Rick Lagina speech, so I am not going to even try.

I believe we’re done for the year.

-Sound good?
-Hear, hear.
-IAN: Sounds good.
-Hear, hear.
-CRAIG:** Thank you.
-Okay. Off we go.
-Here we go.