At the 10-X shaft, Dave Blankenship, Jack Begley, and Dan Henskee sift through debris brought to the surface by the airlift operation. Small pieces of wood are recovered that could be oak, a potentially significant find given that oak trees are not indigenous to the region yet were once plentiful on the island. Some theorists believe Henry Sinclair, whose family assumed leadership of the Knights Templar, sailed from Scotland to Oak Island in 1398 and planted oak trees as a beacon for fellow Templars. A magnetic piece of steel is pulled from the spoils, likely a tool dropped during earlier excavations. More intriguing are several small bones that Jack recovers from the sediment. Dave recalls that his father Dan filmed what he believed was a headless torso at the bottom of 10-X in the 1970s, though he concedes that kittens occasionally fell into the shaft over the years. The bones are set aside for analysis.
At Smith's Cove, roughly 500 feet from the Money Pit, Marty and Alex Lagina prepare for a scuba dive with local Divemaster Tony Sampson, who has explored these waters for years and recently located what appeared to be man-made stone markers on the ocean floor. The team descends to 25 feet in cold, silty conditions with poor visibility. Marty spots a large rectangular stone covered in dense vegetation, followed by a second, slightly smaller one nearby. Tony finds a third. All three formations line up and point directly toward the Money Pit, aligned with a flat boulder visible on the shoreline. The discovery echoes an earlier find: in 1967, Dan Blankenship recovered a stone at Smith's Cove carved with the letter "G" inside a rectangle, a symbol associated with Freemasonry and, through it, the Knights Templar.
That evening at the Fo'c'sle Tavern, the team reviews the day's progress. The underwater stone alignment strikes Rick as significant, given that everything of importance on the island appears connected to deliberately placed rock. Jack presents the metal and bone fragments from 10-X, and the group discusses whether the bones could be human. Craig Tester, joining from Michigan, agrees that any bones should be submitted to a specialist. The team sets its next priority: searching for coconut fiber at Smith's Cove, a substance long associated with the island's flood tunnel system.
Jack Begley and Dan Henskee return to Smith's Cove at low tide to search for coconut fiber. Dan found a sample years earlier while exploring a magnetic anomaly in the same area. In the 1850s, treasure hunters discovered that seawater flooding the Money Pit rose and fell with the tide and traced the source to Smith's Cove, where they uncovered five stone box drains covered with layers of coconut fiber that acted as a filter, allowing water through while keeping the drains clear. The nearest coconut trees grow more than 1,500 miles away, raising the question of who transported such quantities to Nova Scotia. Racing the incoming tide, Jack and Dan dig a pit in the beach and pull a dark, fibrous substance from beneath the stones and gravel.
Alex takes the samples to Saint Mary's University in Halifax, where Dr. Tanya Koslowski examines them under a scanning electron microscope at 650x magnification and confirms the material is genuine coconut fiber. Craig Tester then arranges carbon dating. The results are striking: the fiber dates to between 1260 and 1400 AD with 95 percent confidence, placing it on Oak Island nearly four hundred years before the Money Pit was discovered in 1795. The dating lends weight to theories that the island was visited by the Knights Templar or Spanish explorers during the 13th or 14th century, and that the flood tunnel system was constructed long before any recorded European settlement in Nova Scotia.
