Spanish 8 Maravedis copper coin (swamp)

About This Coin

A copper coin recovered from the Oak Island swamp during Season 1, the first coin ever found on the island during the modern treasure hunt. Rick Lagina discovered it at the Mercy point near the apex of the swamp, an area identified by Norwegian researcher Petter Amundsen as corresponding to a position on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. An eight was visible on its surface, and Rick recognised it as possibly a Spanish maravedi from the 1500s or 1600s. The find electrified the team. For over two hundred years, treasure hunters had recovered wood, coconut fibre, scraps of metal, and other circumstantial evidence from Oak Island, but never a single coin. A local legend about Anthony Graves, a wealthy nineteenth-century island landowner who reportedly paid for goods on the mainland with seventeenth-century Spanish coins but refused to say where he got them, added historical weight to the discovery.

Rick and Marty Lagina brought the coin to Global Marine Exploration in Tampa, Florida, a company specialising in shipwreck artefact salvage. Under a microscope, the team could see white sediment in the cracks and green oxidation consistent with an object that spent centuries submerged in a brackish environment. Technician Jason cleaned the coin using a mild citric acid bath, and after roughly ninety minutes a date became legible on the reverse: 1652, more than 140 years before the Money Pit was discovered. Global Marine confirmed the corrosion pattern was consistent with a swamp find, not a land deposit, strengthening the case that the coin was not planted in modern times.

Dan Blankenship, who had searched the island for nearly 48 years, held the coin and declared it confirmed his long-held belief that the Spanish were responsible for the original depositing activity, placing it between 1500 and 1550. Charles Barkhouse identified the coin as a Spanish maravedi eight cob. The coin has since been referenced as a benchmark artefact in multiple theories, including D'Arcy O'Connor's Spanish galleon hypothesis and connections to the barrote-type decking spike and wooden scuppers Fred Nolan discovered in the swamp in 1969. For Marty Lagina, the coin was decisive: he later revealed that had it not been found, he was prepared to ask Rick to call off the search.