The Curse of Oak Island: TOP 3 SHOCKING SWAMP REVELATIONS

A mysterious triangle-shaped swamp.
Oh wow Rick, check this out—a swamp that contains ancient artifacts.
That is strange, it’s perfectly square.
Yeah, look at that—evidence of sunken ships.
What do you got?
It looks like a piece of finished wood.
[Music]
Whoa, pieces of treasure. Is it a coin?
This is a coin, yes.
And just maybe man-made?
That looks exactly like an old Roman road.
This is really cool.

For nine seasons on the hit series The Curse of Oak Island, brothers Rick and Marty Lagina, along with the Fellowship of the Dig, have made stunning discoveries in the triangle-shaped swamp.
In fact, they’re one of the only groups to ever look for potential clues here since the discovery of the Money Pit in 1795.
Perhaps it was the wretched smell, but these efforts keep paying off.
So tonight, we’re counting down the most incredible discoveries made here that just may soon reveal the ultimate answers to this 227-year-old treasure mystery.

Number 3: The Trade Weight
Here’s what we’ve come up with—holy cow!
I’ll go get a bag for you, but in the meantime, you just keep putting your artifacts in this little dustpan, okay?
And just keep going, and I will be back shortly.

Later that year, Rick Lagina, Charles Barkhouse, and members of the fellowship were painstakingly searching the pathway for clues as to where it led and what its purpose might be.
Definitely seems to be more rock back here, yeah.
Oh.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh!
What do you got?
That is something different there.
Oh, I can see it around, yeah.
What is that?
There’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before.
After finding shards of pottery in the area, unearthing what looked like some kind of metal tool was more than curious.
That’s cool.
The coloration on it is strange.
There’s some markings on the end too. Is it okay?
Let me see that right there.
Yeah.
Some kind of a number, isn’t it?
Damn, is that 55? I see a five.
Do you think it’s some kind of weight or something?

So guess what we’re going to talk about?
Swamp. There you go.
Like so many times before, Charles Barkhouse’s instinct was dead on.
I sent you on some pictures about this item that I found, and it’s very strange.
I showed it to Doug and Scott, we put it on the microscope last night, and Doug thought he saw something.
Yeah, it had milled edges on it.
The ends are indented, and there seem to be some markings inside them.
The closest comparisons we can find are trade weights.

Beginning in the Middle Ages, as Europe became the center of trade from developing nations across the globe, merchants used various types of trade weights as standard methods for weighing different types of goods.
The question was, what kind of trade weight did Rick find along the stone path in the swamp?
It weighs 45 grams, so that’s just about as close as you can get to one-tenth of a pound.
Doug Tom, the interesting part about what it might mean.
We’re just trying to see if the 45 grams matched an ounce measure in any culture or time period, and the only thing that seems to align up right now is a troy ounce—which, of course, the troy ounce is used to measure precious metals.

Hey, I don’t think the average farmer would have a set of trade weights, but these things were in use for a long, long time.
And they were used by, generally speaking, whoever was handling the money—somebody with means, somebody with medals to divide up.
It suggests to me a level of sophistication on whatever it is we’re chasing.
Get after it, we’ll get back out there. Bravo Tango, here.

Number 2: Pieces of Cargo Barrels
Very squidgy, Dana.
[Music]
I’ll try every…

While searching near the Stone Road or Wharf in 2020, Rick and members of the team could hardly contain their excitement at this find.
Yeah, look at that.
Right here.
Check that out.
Cask—oh, that’s more… Nice, mate. Bottom of a keg.
Hey guys, check that out. Top of a keg!
Wow!
So that’s a keg lid?
To keg? Yep.
How far down?
Right there.
Holy crap, that’s very important.
The lower one is the important one because it’s going to frost heave.
And every… That’s right at the cultural level, right? Like, right at the… pretty much.
Look at the amount of mud we have over this.
There’s one just gunpowder to put in kegs. It was all treasure, coins as well.

Gary’s notion that a piece of a cargo barrel could be connected to large quantities of valuables was certainly hopeful, but it was also pretty logical.
After all, the discovery happened right by the remains of the hidden stone wharf.
Clearly, something of great importance had taken place if someone went to all the trouble of creating a swamp to cover it up.
Right, here’s…
No, there’s no… Yeah, another place is this.
Does these go together? This looks too rounded.
Yeah, they’re different. Different radii.
This is very important. It’s because this is down at the bottom of this mud layer.
I think as we move more towards that road, we’re going to find more and more stuff.

The keg tops that came out of the swamp are extremely interesting to me. It’s way out of place where we should get some answers from these two pieces.
I think there’s some information to be gleaned from them.
Might they indicate a certain type of tool? I.E., a certain type of cultural influence?
I think the thing to do at this point is not to speculate about the why they’re there or how they came to be there.
I very much look forward to whatever chemical analysis could be done.
It’s all about the application of science. We should get some answers from these two pieces.

So what brings you here today?
We have a couple of artifacts and potentially incredible information was gleaned from the cargo barrels when members of the team showed them to blacksmithing expert Carmen Legg.
Let’s have a quick look.
Yeah, it’s definitely a barrel head.
Bob made a few barrels in my time.
Sort of indicate certain aspects of this type of head and barrel construction.
This one is extremely old because it’s handmade.

Can you venture to put a date on extremely old?
Well, if you look at the taper on there, it’s not an abrupt taper.
There’s a very long taper, right?
Just as typical of when they started making wooden casks.
So that could go right straight back to the 1400s.

Carmen’s opinion that the barrels could date back as much as eight centuries made them potentially one of the oldest finds ever made on the island.
So the question was: could they have, in fact, been the type of cargo container used to move valuables?

This was for a dry goods barrel. So it would be gunpowder, flour, or something that was not wet.
That is very, very, very old.
Type of construction on the head predates barrel making here in Nova Scotia.
This was found on the East Bank of the swamp. So, I mean, if they were transporting things up or down that hillside, you know, it would have easily got pushed off as time went on.
Yes, that’s right, yeah.
So you think dry goods?
Yes, it’s not a water-type barrel.
No.
You know what else is dry?
Gold.
Yeah.
That’s true. That’s true. Yep. Very interesting.

Number 1: The Cobblestone Pathway
Okay.
About here, you think?
Yeah, I think that should work.
First scan coming up.

Following up on the team’s discovery of the stone road in 2021, Alex Lagina and his cousin David Fernetti conducted a ground-penetrating radar scan beginning where the rocky feature appeared to end at the eastern border of the swamp.
Let’s see if we got any…
That looks pretty good.
Look at that.
Oh, that’s interesting.

I mean, we started on the stone road.
What was exposed…
And at roughly the same depth, there is a consistent feature or anomaly about the same width that runs right along with it.
Yeah, so we might be picking it up.
Even in the uplands, there where we thought it ended, it might still continue.
Incredibly, there’s a good chance the stone road is under us right here.
It was almost unbelievable.

Could it really be true that the stone road unearthed in the southeast corner of the swamp actually extended into the uplands?
There was only one way to find out.

If there’s a road, that’s what we’re after today and clues.
Yeah, I’ve been wanting to dig this ever since we were out here delineating this thing.
Several weeks later, Marty Lagina himself led the dig to see just what his son Alex and nephew David had found leading away from the swamp.
All right, positions everyone. All right.
[Music]
Whoa, whoa, whoa—look at this!
That could be the road!
You may want to take a look, really.
There’s a lot of cobble there.
Yeah.
Kind of looks like down there.
It does, it does.
All right, well, I’m going to go dig over there.
Yeah, that’s a good start.

This new area looks a lot like it’s the beginning of yet another road going off to the east.
The obvious thing to do is follow the road.
See where it leads us, keep digging.
The only unfortunate aspect of this groundbreaking find was that it came at the tail end of last year, when the team was forced to end their search activities due to the onset of winter.

Nevertheless, the team quickly began to formulate an idea for this pathway’s purpose.
That’s impressive.

So what do you think?
Well, we all have in our mind that it’s a nice cobble path coming up here.
So they’re hauling something up.
So they’re still filling. They’re filling in low areas just to make a path.
Yes, yeah.
If you look down here…
The road went through here, we say.
Yeah, it essentially comes off of the stone road and the swamp.
Oh yeah, it’s kind of like a central area.
You’ve got the Money Pit over there, paved area, swamp—we’re in the middle of that area.
Yeah.

It really made the team wonder if this cobblestone path may have been utilized to haul, no say, cargo barrels and chests that had been unloaded from a ship onto the stone road or wharf and then away from the swamp to their final hiding place in the Money Pit.

The interesting thing, you know, we were lucky enough to see an actual Roman road in Portugal, but when we got to the higher elevations, this is what we saw.
Yeah, it was somewhat rudimentary, just like here.

Incredibly, just as Marty and members of the team had been uncovering the cobblestone path…
Foreign.
Rick and Alex Lagina were in Portugal investigating potential ties between the Knights Templar and the Oak Island mystery.
It looks a lot more similar to what we have, that’s for sure.
Yeah, and like Rick said, they not only saw a stone road that was nearly identical to the one in the southeast corner of the swamp but also a cobblestone pathway just like the one unearthed between the swamp and the Money Pit.