Unbelievable Treasures Uncovered: What Does It Mean? (Season 12) | The Curse of Oak Island

-MARTY: Morning.
-TOM: Hey, guys. How are you? Hanging in there. Ready for some big revelations.
Well, this could be the spot to find some.

NARRATOR: …the Laginas and Gary join Craig Tester, fellow Oak Island landowner Tom Nolan and other members of the team in the northern region of the swamp. Rick’s been wanting to dig this, I don’t know, forever. 15 years or so.

NARRATOR: It is here where they are searching for caches of valuables that may lie hidden outside of the Money Pit area. The thing about this place is, it’s all about your dad, to me.
-Yep.
-RICK: You know, he believed that there was something here to find. So let’s get out in the machine, let’s position it,
-and let’s get to it.
-Yep. Let’s dig. ♪ ♪
-I want to get dirty.
-(chuckles)

NARRATOR: In 1969, legendary treasure hunter Fred Nolan drained the swamp and was shocked to discover pieces of large sailing vessels. He also found 16th-century wooden survey stakes. Tools that Fred believed had been used to create the brackish bog in order to hide numerous caches of valuables.

CRAIG: Seems to be quite a few more rocks at least right in through here.

NARRATOR: Incredibly, several weeks ago after uncovering a cobblestone pathway, and a number of additional survey stakes in the northern region of the swamp, the team discovered an empty vault-like structure made of brick and slate.

RICK: This is gonna have some real answers. I really believe that.

NARRATOR: Now, along with Fred’s son Tom, Rick, Marty and Craig are searching several yards to the north. It is their hope that they will uncover similar hidden structures that will prove Fred’s theory to be true.

RICK: If we find another of these vaults, we can only assume something was hidden here. And hopefully, whatever was once here is still here. Hey! What’s that?

GARY: Oh, look at that! A really nice-looking sharpened stake.

TOM: Isn’t that amazing? It just looks like the day it went in the ground. Yeah. That’s hand-hewn, wasn’t it?

TOM: Yeah.

GARY: This is impressive. What is that? Two stakes.

NARRATOR: Now the question is, could they be clues to validate Fred Nolan’s theory that hidden valuables might also be found in this area? Are these the first ones that have been found on this side?

TOM: No. Years ago, we found two or three closer to the, to the road. But this is the first ones I know of that were found this deep into the swamp on this side.

-RICK: Look at that. There’s a bunch of cobble here. I don’t know if you can see it or not. It’s just right here and it’s going that way. Yeah.

NARRATOR: More cobblestones? Found near the hand-hewn survey stakes? Is it possible that the team has, indeed, uncovered another section of the cobblestone pathway? If so, could it lead the team to a vault that still contains something of incredible value?

RICK: It’s almost like they’re stacked. Right?
-That’s a Spooner question.
-RICK: Yep. That’s a Spooner question. There certainly appears to be a structure in the north end of the bog, so I want Dr. Spooner to come and render an opinion about whether or not it is a man-made structure.

TOM: It looks stacked, but I don’t know.

RICK: We have to follow this. There’s no question about it. Yeah.

ALEX: Hey, guys.
-KATYA: Hey, guys.
-TOM: Hey, guys. How are you?
-IAN: How’s it going?
-KATYA: Good. Welcome to another big question mark.

NARRATOR: …geoscientist Dr. Ian Spooner joins other members of the team in the northern region of the swamp. What do you think? There’s a pretty clear, defined side over there and the same over here.

NARRATOR: It is the team’s hope that Dr. Spooner will be able to verify that the cobblestone feature they uncovered one day ago is part of a man-made pathway.

GARY: There was a couple of, uh, sharpened stakes found down there, right at the side of it.
-ALEX: How big?
-About this big. The thing that always gets me interested in these features, having looked at them for the last three years, is that these big stones are all of a size that could be handled by people. This was their path.

SCOTT: It’s kind of almost to the edge. Again, we only have a small section of it uncovered. On the south side, with the cobble path, it was cleared archaeologically so you could see the structure clearly.

ALEX: Well, let’s cut a section then. Why not? I’m fine with that.

ALEX: I’m thinking of this as a really targeted way to apply our archaeological resources to the challenge of the swamp. And we can, hopefully, apply the results that we get to any of these other features in the swamp.

STEVE: All right. With that, I’m actually gonna take the information I have back to the research center and see where it points to.
-ALEX: Let us know what you come up with.
-We will. All right. Thanks, guys.

LAIRD: See you later.

NARRATOR: The following morning…

RICK: I applaud everyone for having real belief in the work in the swamp that we have done to date. Rick, Marty, Craig and other members of the team are meeting with surveyor Steve Guptill in the war room. I think the swamp is integral to understanding this incredibly complex mystery and it becomes more complex by the day.

NARRATOR: After inputting the new data regarding the wooden stakes and various sections of the cobblestone pathway that have been recently found in the swamp, Steve has created a digital survey that also includes other man-made features the team has uncovered in the brackish bog during the past several years.

Steve, I think it’s up to you to explain what we found and what it might mean. Let’s start with the survey lines. I believe it was you who found on Fred’s plans a line of survey stakes. This is probably 2018. We dug this line here and we found three stakes.

-MARTY: Yeah. That’s right, yeah.
-RICK: I remember.
-MARTY: That’s right.
-IAN: Sure. Then we go to yesterday. I tagged three of these survey stakes. As you can see, almost perfectly on that calculated line, a straight line north and south.

TOM: These things were put down for a reason. It is consistent with a surveying use.

STEVE: 100%. Well, if they are reference points for something, it’s definitely some construction site. So that segues well into the cobble path. Here’s the cobble we found yesterday. There’s the three stakes that we’ve surveyed with that land on the survey line.

SCOTT: Right.

STEVE: So project that back, it looks like it relates to the cobble path. That comes off the stone road and heads west. The pathway seems to be connected to everything that we find. If we continue westward and northwestward, we come into the Eye, we come into this wooden platform we found this year.

Okay. So another area that this projects to is the cobble found next to the vault. The cut slate with the bricks.

Oh, really?

IAN: So at this stage, it seems that all these features are loosely connected in time and that time period is, uh, from the late 1600s to the mid-1700s, and that’s well before the searchers and in my opinion, it wasn’t farmers, it wasn’t fishermen.

JACK: Based upon those dates, it’s similar to some of the dates we’re getting from the Lot 5 feature.
-Yeah. Yeah. I’m thinking that there’s a connection to the Money Pit, to the swamp and Lot 5. And that they were doing work around the whole island.

ALEX: I think this is good because when we first found this cobble in our northern dig, I suspected, okay, maybe this is the connection between the, the cobble path and Lot 5.
-Yeah.
-ALEX: So we have a pretty targeted area here where we can keep digging and try to establish that connection. If you were to project the line further to the northwest it could go up to Lot 5.

MARTY: Cool.

NARRATOR: Could Steve’s findings help prove the team’s previous suspicion that the stone foundation on Lot 5 served as a staging ground for an operation to hide one or more treasure vaults in the Money Pit? And perhaps also in the swamp?

I mean, at-at this point, I think we have so many 1700 dates that… if, whatever was going on on Lot 5 was going on in the swamp was whatever was going on in the Money Pit. I mean, we just find the dates everywhere. 1600s, 1700s seem to be the most consistent date we find island-wide.

And so whatever was going on on the island, I think we can start to piece it together that a major part of the construction on Oak Island was 1680 to 1750.
-Yeah.
-Yeah.

It is an enormous undertaking if these cobble features are connected in time. Obviously, there was an intent, there was a purpose, and possibly an association with the Duc d’Anville expedition, but there’s still a lot of puzzle to put together here. So the work needs to continue.

There’s now this belief, and I hope it is a well and truly an established belief at this point, that it is literally an island-wide mystery. And that’s how we need to look at this and we have to do activities that are insular from each other, meaning, the activities in the Money Pit, the activities on Lot 5, the activities on the eastern drumlin, the activities in the bog, at some point they will meld, they will come together.

Nice report, Steve. Well done.

STEVE: Thanks, guys.

MARTY: Now let’s keep going.