Drawn wire at 110 ft (Triton borehole, 1973)

About This Artifact

In 1973 Triton Alliance drilled a series of exploratory boreholes on Oak Island. One of them, about 660 feet north of the Money Pit, brought up a piece of wire from a depth of 110 feet. The Steel Company of Canada examined it and, in a report dated 11 June 1973, described it as typical of wire drawn between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The find led Triton to sink a shaft on the spot. The Triton Shaft, twelve by six feet, was dug in late 1973 and early 1974 but abandoned at 100 feet when the money ran out, ten feet short of the depth at which the wire had been found. Nothing further was learned about the wire or how it came to be there.

Graham Harris and Les MacPhie, the engineers who compiled the Triton-era records, point out that a date range of three centuries does little to fix when any original work took place. The location is what sets the find apart. At 660 feet north it lies far from the Money Pit and from the line of the flood tunnel to Smith's Cove, and at 110 feet it sits far below the depth at which a dropped object would normally come to rest. Drawn wire had come up in Borehole 10X two years earlier, from above 165 feet, together with chain and folded wrought iron. Whether the 1973 wire marks a separate underground working or was carried down by the drilling itself cannot be determined from the surviving account.