Lifting chain (wharf cargo)

About This Tool

A crude handmade chain assembled with a hook and a ring was recovered from the swamp near the stone road during Season 11 filming. Alex Lagina spotted the chain hanging from Billy Gerhardt's excavator bucket, and Gary Drayton retrieved it. Rick Lagina compared the design to a multi-point hitch. In the same excavation pass, Drayton pulled a piece of wood with what appeared to be a spike embedded in it, followed by another piece containing a rose head spike that he dated to the 1700s or possibly older.

Blacksmith expert Carmen Legge examined the chain assembly at the Interpretive Centre and gave a specific reading. The hook showed no curve in its shank, a feature Legge said marked it as older than examples with curved shanks. He placed the hook in the 1500s and no later than 1650. The chain connecting the hook to its ring was from the same period and handmade. Three chains at the end of the assembly were machine-made later additions, indicating the original device had been repaired or extended after the industrial era. Legge said the assembly would have been used to lift or drag cargo, or hung from a boom for loading at a harbor.

The recovery context placed the chain near the stone road in the swamp, the feature the team had been investigating as a possible transport route used by whoever did the original work on the island. If Legge's dating is accepted, the chain predates the documented arrival of European settlers on the Mahone Bay coast and pushes the operational date of the stone road at least into the mid-seventeenth century, with an upper limit no later than 1650. Carbon dating of the stone road paving had previously returned a date in the 1200s, consistent with Templar-era theories advanced for the site. The chain itself was not submitted for laboratory analysis.