About This Artifact
An eighteen-foot wooden plank recovered from the triangle-shaped swamp by professional diver Tony Sampson during Season 4 in 2016. The plank had first been observed during Season 1 swamp work but was not physically retrieved or sampled for dating until Sampson relocated it in the back pond. The retrieval followed Matt Savelle's EM-61 MK IIA metal detection survey of the swamp for Canadian Seabed Research, which identified targets at the northern tip near the back pond and along the southwestern border. Beta Analytic ran carbon-14 testing and returned a build date of 1680 to 1735 at 90 percent probability, placing the timber more than half a century before the Money Pit's 1795 discovery.
The plank's thinness led the team to conclude it was deck planking rather than side planking from a masted ship. The find did not stand alone. Gary Drayton recovered a heavy iron spike from the north end of the swamp during the same season, which Dr. Lori Verderame identified as a barrote, a wrought iron deck nail of the type used to fasten planks to the deck beams of Spanish galleons, and dated to earlier than 1652. Fred Nolan had previously pulled scuppers from the swamp during his 1969 drainage work, and the Spanish maravedi coin recovered from the swamp at the end of Season 1 fell within the same broader period. Oak stumps from Mercy Point at the swamp's edge had earlier carbon-dated to 1450-1640, indicating the swamp had once been dry land.
Together, the plank, the barrote, the scuppers, the maravedi, and the dated oak stumps supported Fred Nolan's long-held theory that a Spanish-built vessel had been deliberately scuttled in what is now the swamp, with the area subsequently transformed into a freshwater bog to conceal the ship. The Beta Analytic date range for the plank aligns with later finds from the same swamp area, including a trapezoid-shaped wood piece recovered in Season 9 that radiocarbon-dated to 1683-1735, and a second unidentified swamp wood piece dated to 1680-1740. Together these finds reinforced the pattern of late 17th and early 18th century activity in the swamp before the Money Pit was discovered in 1795.
Historical Context
Tony Sampson recovery; Beta Analytic radiocarbon dating; The Curse of Oak Island Season 4 Episode 3 "Swamp Things" (29 November 2016); Randall Sullivan, The Curse of Oak Island: The Story of the World's Longest Treasure Hunt (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2018)
Where It Was Found
Found at Swamp, back pond near northern tip — the triangle-shaped swamp on Oak Island's southeastern quadrant.
