Rebuilding from Within

Dumas Contracting arrives on the island to reconstruct the Garden Shaft, a structure now confirmed to date to 1735 and sitting just 20 feet from the Money Pit. The project proves grueling: the Nova Scotia government halts work over permit requirements, months are lost, and the shaft must be meticulously cribbed and reinforced as the team descends through layers of old timber and unstable ground. Probe drilling from inside the shaft detects a tunnel at approximately 95 feet heading westward, directly toward the zone where gold and silver have been found in the water. Meanwhile, a new drilling program in the Money Pit area identifies what Marty Lagina dubs the Blob, a concentration of anomalous underground features. In Rome, Rick Lagina, Doug Crowell, Alex Lagina, Peter Fornetti, and Corjan Mol meet with numismatist Umberto Moruzzi, who confirms that a half coin from Lot 5 is a 4th-century Roman artifact and identifies a bronze piece from Lot 7 as an ancient monetary weight matching a golden Byzantine coin. The team then travels to Viterbo, where Templar investigator Gianluca Di Prosper leads them through the 11th-century church of Santa Maria Nuova, revealing four-dot crosses and carved symbols that Alex connects to the H+O stone found on Oak Island. Charles Barkhouse makes the first descent into the reconstructed Garden Shaft as the season closes, with the tunnel tantalizingly close.