The summer I returned to Nova Scotia, I anticipated that the exploration of the two shafts that were being driven down in the Money Pit area was going to be the most interesting thing I would see on Oak Island. What I didn’t imagine was that the Laginas and company would be going back to 10X that summer as well.
Marty was against it, of course, but his brother, Rick, remained adamant that the borehole had not been fully explored. It was agreed that the underwater sonar detection expert Brian Abbott should be brought back to the island to try to reconcile his description of the images he had seen in the cavity at the bottom of 10X with what diver John Chatterton had reported. The focus was on what Abbott had described as a “chest” but that Chatterton said was a large rectangular rock. While inside the cavity at the bottom of 10X, Chatterton had moved the rock to a different position on the floor, so if Abbott could find his “chest” in the same spot it had been when he looked before, that would mean Chatterton hadn’t actually found it. The object had moved, though, Abbott found, meaning that Chatterton was right: it was a rock, not a chest.
This gave Marty more ammunition for the argument that it was time to abandon 10X. Rick was still not willing to do that, however, and neither was Dave Blankenship, who rarely inserted himself into the decision-making process on Oak Island but did this time. He had promised his mother, Jane, that they’d make a thorough search of 10X and he intended to keep that promise, Dave said. Charles Barkhouse interjected that the items Dan Blankenship believed he saw in 10X might be entirely covered with silt, not easy for a diver, even Chatterton, to detect in what was basically a zero-visibility environment. Dan Blankenship offered the closing argument. Rick finally made it into Dan’s basement, along with his brother and the others, where Blankenship put on the same show-and-tell he had done for me thirteen years earlier, laying out the materials that had come out of 10X back in the early 1970s. What they were looking at was more than anyone had ever brought up out of the Money Pit, Dan stated.
Marty remained reluctant. Their budget was already strained and going back into 10X would limit their operations in the Money Pit area. When Craig Tester agreed with his partner Marty, Rick said he and Dave Blankenship would do the work in 10X themselves. That put Marty on the spot and in the end he announced that he owed it to Dan to do as the old man asked and take another look at 10X. He wouldn’t accept any cutback in the work at the Money Pit site, though, so that meant going deeper into his pocket.
THE CAISSONS WERE ALMOST IN PLACE at the first shaft being dug at the Money Pit site by then. The enormity of the three-hundred-ton crane used to lift the caissons was astounding. When work had paused for the weekend, I had Jack Begley take a photo of me standing on the base of that gargantuan rig and could barely make myself out as a tiny dot on the giant object when I brought the picture up on my iPhone.
Both the Lagina brothers believed—or at least hoped—that this first shaft was more or less directly above the Chappell vault. But almost immediately a new dispute arose between Rick and Marty about the pace of the operation. Marty wanted to dig as fast and as deep as possible, because this was their one and only chance at an excavation of the Money Pit and he wanted to accomplish as much as he could, while Rick insisted that they proceed cautiously, for fear of damaging the precious artifacts he believed might be inside the vault. The vault had been breached more than a century earlier, and whatever was in there was long-since soaked with saltwater, Marty pointed out. Rick argued that it might be wet but also intact; he wasn’t going to agree to anything potentially destructive. Matters came to a head when the ribbed teeth on the bottom of the caisson began to scrape against what the operator said were horizontal pieces of wood.
Things didn’t really begin to get interesting until the crew was ready to send the “hammer grab” down the shaft. This was a long cylinder with what looked like metal jaws at the bottom. After Rick convinced Marty they should lower the hammer grab just 2 inches at a time once they made contact with the wood in the shaft, the apparatus was lifted out, its jaws clutching a large chunk of wood. “We bingoed it!” Marty exulted. Rick was slightly despondent at the amount of damage they might be doing to the vault. More timbers were lifted out of the shaft, but the excitement onsite was soon quieted by the discovery that the wood had been cut with a circular saw, a tool that wasn’t used in North America until the late nineteenth century. This certainly wasn’t part of the original work. Dan Blankenship was of the opinion they had brought up part of the Chappell shaft, most likely timbers that had shored up the 10-foot stub of a lateral tunnel that had been abandoned because of the cave-ins caused by flooding.
The decision was made to move to the second “target site,” C1, the spot chosen by Charles Barkhouse. C1 was where Charles had seen a “shiny gold object” when a camera was sent down the narrow tube of the initial borehole. Much drama was made of sending down a camera to take a look. The pictures that came back seemed to confirm that there was a 21-foot-wide cavity at the bottom of C1, and some of those aboveground thought they saw an opening at a 90-degree angle to the floor of the cavity that could be a tunnel. There was also a moment when the camera seemed to catch sight of something shiny. Craig said it was almost certainly the camera’s light reflecting off anhydrite.
It was decided to send the hammer grab down C1. What it brought up, mostly, was big rocks. There were a few splinters of wood, and some of them had come from deep underground, more than 10 feet below the bottom of the stacked caissons, where the void under the bedrock lay below 160 feet. When Charles showed Dan Blankenship one of those splinters, the old man held it to his nose. Dan claimed to be able to tell the age of wood by smelling it and carbon-dating had proven him right about that more than once. This was very old, he told Charles, but most likely not enough to be original work.
JOHN CHATTERTON WAS BACK on the island, preparing for a dive down C1. Before he went into the shaft, though, a new team of sonar experts were going to use equipment from BlueView Technologies to make certain the void at the bottom of the shaft was stable enough for Chatterton to enter and explore the opening “leading off your void,” as the chief technician, Blaine Carr, put it. His scans had showed, Carr would explain later, “what looks to be a corridor” opening in the wall about 10 feet from the outer edge of the caisson, about 7 feet high and 10 feet across. The reason he believed it was man-made, Carr said, was that it went at an almost perfectly perpendicular 90-degree angle to the shaft. And the void did seem safe for a diver.
Chatterton again went down wearing a helmet fed by umbilicals. After being lowered through the pipe to the water level, Chatterton quickly descended through the rest of the caisson and within seconds was standing on the bottom of the void at a depth of slightly more than 170 feet. Predictably, visibility was terrible. Chatterton churned silt up from the floor of the void with every move. Going almost entirely by feel, the diver described soft clay beneath his feet, very little water movement, and walls that were extremely irregular. When Chatterton had groped his way to what he thought was the entrance to the corridor, he reported that the roughness of the interior walls suggested to him that it was a man-made feature, something that had been chipped out, because walls worn away by water would have been much smoother.
After Chatterton came up, his partner, Mike Huntley, went down, armed with a metal detector that immediately began to deliver hits. He was fairly certain he had found a “block” of metal embedded in the wall of the void, something that felt smooth and wavy, Huntley reported, but he was unable to pry it loose. He had gotten two more “hard hits” with the metal detector as he probed the clay floor, Huntley said after he returned to the surface. Chatterton himself went down only a short time later with the metal detector and got exactly no hits in either the wall or the floor of C1. The people on the surface looked at one another and said, “Oak Island,” in unison.
After some debate about whether to continue exploring C1 or to turn to the third and last planned shaft that was to be put down that season, it was agreed to do the latter. There was considerable disagreement, though, about where to sink it. Gathered in Dan Blankenship’s basement around a drawing that had been made by Mel Chappell of where he believed the Money Pit could be found, Marty voted for digging there. Rick, though, wanted to try the northeast corner of the broader target area, while mild-mannered Craig was surprisingly insistent that they should try the southeast. In the end it was decided that Craig should choose the spot for the third shaft. T1, it would be called, T being for Tester.
The probe of T1 looked promising almost immediately. For one thing, they were going much deeper than usual without finding water. Almost always, the seawater in the Money Pit area was reached at a depth of 40 feet or so. The shaft known as Valley3 was just feet away and it was full of water, but T1 stayed dry. Then, when the hammer grab was sent down to a depth of just 102 feet, it came back with a large vertical piece of wood that was clearly hand-sawn; it was the first time that summer that hand-sawn wood had been brought up from underground in the Money Pit area. Craig’s speculation that they had probably hit a tunnel dug by the Truro Company rang true, given the depth.
Even more exciting was the 3-inch-diameter round piece of wood that was brought up from 122 feet. It was utterly black and to Craig looked “old-old.” Dan Blankenship took a whiff of the round piece and said the odor was the foulest he had ever breathed on Oak Island. This was original work, Dan declared, and carbon-dating seemed to confirm it. The piece from 102 feet was dated to between 1670 and 1780, while the pieces brought up from below 120 feet were dated to between 1655 and 1695. What they had held in their hands, all agreed, were pieces from the original construction of the Money Pit. The hammer grab was sent down again, and the excitement was palpable as it was raised—its jaws holding nothing but chunks of anhydrite floating in clay. The hammer grab went down again and again, with the same result; not even a splinter of wood. At 156 feet they finally hit water, and bedrock was reached soon after. They were done with T1, Marty declared, and no one disagreed.
Rick, though, was not ready to quit for the season. They should try one more shaft he said, at the spot he had suggested. His logic seemed sound to me. A few weeks earlier, he had told me that he was concerned the calculations that had been done as to the exact location of the Money Pit weren’t taking into account the 1861 collapse of the Pit, when the bottom hadn’t just fallen out, but most likely tumbled in the direction of the tunneling that had caused the collapse, which he believed had come from the southwest. Specifically, he wanted to try 7 feet south and 4 feet west of the spot where Chappell had said the center of the Money Pit would be found.
On camera, Marty made a speech about how Rick deserved to get his wish, because nobody had sacrificed more or been less self-aggrandizing. I had the feeling I believed it more than Rick did. Marty, though, looked genuinely moved when Rick said he wanted to call this last shaft GAL1, for George and Anne Lagina, their parents. Both brothers made regular references to their mother, who sounded like a paragon of pluck, quoting her various maxims: “Forward, always forward” and that sort of thing. I asked Rick once about George and he said his father had been an almost impossibly good man. When I asked him for an example, Rick told me he had once asked his father what his greatest regret might be. George thought about it for a while, then said that he had skipped Mass a couple of times while serving in the army during World War II.
While GAL1 was being put down, there was a return to 10X, where it had been decided to try an “airlift” in which an immense compression system combined with pumps to lower the water level might bring up objects from below. At 235 feet, 10X was still the deepest hole on Oak Island and bringing up hundreds of pounds of sediment from the bottom of the borehole sounded nearly impossible to me, but in fact the operation yielded not one but two moments of suspense that would, at a minimum, carry over into the next season of the show. One of those items brought up out of the borehole offered at least the possibility of confirmation for Dan Blankenship’s indefatigable conviction that there was a wealth of information at the bottom of 10X.
Jack Begley and Craig Tester had found that item while washing down the spoils sucked up from the bottom of the borehole. It was a large piece of wood that appeared to be coated with pitchblende, which would have dated it to no later than the mid-eighteenth century. When Dan gave it the smell test, he said it was very old and that he could see it had been cut with a handsaw. It was the first piece of wood cut by men that had ever come out of 10X, said Dan, who was demanding to know how it could possibly be at the bottom of the borehole if there was no tunnel connecting 10X to the Money Pit.
When the long hose connected to the equipment that was essentially vacuuming the bottom of 10X had first been dropped into the shaft, Dan called out to the operator: “Watch out for bones!” The old man was spending as much time as he could watching the airlift operation at 10X, fretting over the possibility that the activity down below could cause a collapse of the fissure in the shaft at a depth of 222 feet. If that happened, Dan knew it would mean that the hole in the ground that had consumed so many years of his life would be closed forever. The collapse never occurred but there was a moment of real drama when the airlift was stopped by an obstruction that had blocked the hose. The bangs and rattles that sounded each time the machine was restarted in an attempt to draw the obstruction through indicated it was a solid object. That was confirmed when the pipe finally cleared and a search of the spoils resulted in the discovery of a bone, whether animal or human I wasn’t told.
Though not so obviously exciting, the carbon dating of the hand-sawn wood that had come out of 10X was truly significant. When those dates were reported, I felt fairly confident the search for the tunnel at the bottom of the borehole would continue.
By then the caissons in GAL1 had been driven down to 151 feet, deep enough to start sending the hammer grab into the shaft. Buckets of what appeared to be pieces of primitive cement came up first, then fragments of wood in 6-inch-by-6-inch chunks. When Gary Drayton went over the spoils from GAL1 with his metal detector, he found a piece of hammered iron with a square hole. It was for a square nail, Drayton said, the kind that were used until the end of the 1700s, hand forged with tapering square shafts. The fact that the piece of iron had been pounded flat by hand also suggested a date no later than the eighteenth century.
Larger pieces of wood, square-shaped and hand-cut timbers, began coming up next. Dave Blankenship, who knew construction, said the notches suggested to him they were roof pieces. Craig Tester thought they might be on top of the vault. Then the hammer grab brought up bigger sheets of hammered metal that weren’t iron and might have been tin, but felt too heavy for that. There was speculation that they might be from a furnace that had been lowered into the shaft to draw down air.
The anticipation grew every time the hammer grab was lowered another foot, but then suddenly, at 154 feet, the drilling caisson stopped. Whatever it had hit created such friction that the oscillator couldn’t turn even slightly. A chisel bit was sent down to act as a battering ram in the hopes the object could be broken or pushed aside. It made only a slight penetration, but it was enough to send down a smaller hammer grab to collect whatever had been loosened. What it came back up with was remarkable, a piece of heavy, rectangular, hand-hammered steel with holes in it that also appeared to have been cut by hand. Craig Tester at once called it a corner piece, which of course raised the possibility that it was from the corner of a chest. Marty would observe only that there was “no modern look to it,” nor to the large, thick washer and nut that the smaller hammer grab also brought up from a depth of about 160 feet.
The exploration of GAL1 was brought to a halt when the hammer grab snagged on something so heavy it couldn’t be pulled past it. After being lowered and raised repeatedly, the hammer grab finally came loose and was winched to the surface, but the operator and the company he worked for didn’t want to send it down again, for fear of losing it. The Laginas and Craig Tester were fearful of destroying whatever it was the hammer grab had been stopped by. And now it was late October; the weather was wetter and cooler each day. Nova Scotia winters begin, for all practical purposes, in November.
The final congregation of the season in the War Room featured a Skype conference with Dr. Lori Verderame, who had analyzed the items recovered from GAL1. One was yet another gold-plated dandy button, dated to between 1775 and 1815, which almost certainly meant it had been on the cuff of either the first or second team of searchers. It was what Craig had called a corner brace, though, that was of most interest. Dr. Verderame described it as a decorative bracket “used to actually attach the metal or wooden sides of treasure chests.” She dated it and the other metal pieces brought up out of GAL1 to between 1650 and 1800, which meant they were almost certainly part of the original work. It was arguably, along with the piece of parchment, the most significant artifact ever brought up from underground on Oak Island. And, of course, a good cliffhanger.