The Curse of Oak Island: CANNONBALL DISCOVERY Linked to Treasure Defenses (Season 8) | History

At the wash table near 10x for data,
cents, northwest the money pit we went to 150,
160 feet of our remember correctly.
Surveyor Steve Guptill and treasure hunter Michael John
are sifting through the spoils from a borehole known as
E 5.25.

Steve, look at this.
Oh wow, you know what it looks like to me?
I think that’s a cannonball or a grape shot, yeah, of some sort.
So yeah, I don’t know how all these can date.
I know they can date old, but a grape shot or a small cannonball,
that’s about the size, that’s right, yeah.
A small cannonball or possibly grape shot used as artillery in both land-based and naval warfare,
dating back to the 15th century.
Grapeshot was made of materials such as metal,
stone, or clay, which were tightly packed into clusters
and fired from cannons in order to
sink warships on the high seas.

Is it possible that Michael has now discovered a piece of artillery
that may be connected to that very weapon
and in a borehole that might also be near or even
intersecting the original money pit?

All right, prepare to astonish me. Here we go.
Arriving on the heels of this potentially important discovery
are Marty Lagina and archaeologist Dr. Aaron Taylor.

What the hell was that?
It’s got an interesting weight to it, eh?
Do you have any ideas?
Um, right now I’m not sure. Let’s hear yours.
Um… grape shot, some sort of, um… weapon.
Grape shot, yeah. That’s pretty interesting.
Yeah, it is, isn’t it?
Yeah, I think so too. You know what?
You could be right. Maybe it is grape shot.
I think it’s a cool find. We need to get a lot of eyes on that, and somebody might know what it is.

When I see this little rock cannonball thing, I know immediately who needs to have a look at it.
Gary needs to have a look at it; he’s found such things before.
And Laird needs to have a look at it.
It’s definitely worth collecting.
I’ll tell you what, even if it’s nothing, I’ll put it on my desk.
[Laughter]

Later that afternoon in the Oak Island Research Center:

Hey, guys.
Hey, Marty.

Okay, Marty Lagina meets up with Oak Island historian Doug Kroll along with Gary Drayton and archaeologist Laird Niven
to share the team’s latest discovery.

I still think this little artifact here, you guys haven’t seen it yet, but I think it’s something.
Have you seen this, Gary?
I’m hoping that is something similar that I’ve recovered in England.
Yes, it is. I was hoping that this stone was exactly like this.

What is it?
This is a dress stone or a gun stone.
This is really, really old.
This is a projectile, mate, before the days of cannonballs,
iron cannonballs.
They called them dress stones because the guys were out
looking for stones of a certain size.
They became known as gun stones, but it’s a projectile. It was fired out of a blunderbuss on an old ship,
dating back to before the 17th century.

A blunderbuss is a firearm with a short, large-caliber barrel
that featured a flared muzzle, known as the predecessor to the modern shotgun.
The blunderbuss was a single-shot weapon
that utilized gun stones, iron musket balls, and other projectiles.

Incredibly, it was also a type of weapon long associated with the pilgrims who founded the Plymouth Colony.
Could this discovery actually be evidence that helps corroborate James McQuiston’s
theory of who might have been behind the Oak Island mystery?

I get energized when they actually turn up something.
Yeah, that’s fantastic.