About This Tool
Among the nails and spikes recovered during Triton Alliance's 1970 excavation at Smith's Cove was an object recorded as a hand-forged wrought iron caulking tool. The excavation took place inside an earth cofferdam built that summer to hold back the sea from the beach where the Truro Company had first exposed the flood system's filter bed in 1850. Before storms overtopped the dam, the same dig uncovered the U-shaped log structure with its Roman numeral marks, a small wooden box, a wrought iron ruler and a pair of scissors.
A caulking iron is a flat-bladed chisel driven with a mallet to force oakum or fiber into the seams between timbers and make them watertight. It is a shipwright's tool, and a tool for anyone building timber work that has to keep water out. Graham Harris and Les MacPhie, the geotechnical engineers who reconstructed the Smith's Cove works, give this find weight. In their reading the log structure is the remnant of a timber cofferdam built by British military engineers between 1752 and 1754, and a caulking tool is what a crew would need to keep its seaward face sealed through two years of storms. The authors also allow that the log structure could belong to the Halifax Company's cofferdam of 1866. Allan Dove of the Steel Company of Canada examined nails, spikes and tools from the excavation in 1970 and dated all but one to before 1790, but the published account does not confirm whether the caulking tool was among the pieces he received.
Historical Context
Graham Harris and Les MacPhie, Oak Island and its Lost Treasure, third edition (Formac Publishing, Halifax, 2013), chapters 6 and 11.
Where It Was Found
Found at Smith's Cove, 1970 excavation inside the Triton cofferdam; exact findspot not recorded. Location: the cove at the east end of Oak Island where the flood system's box drains were found in 1850.
