Paul Cote reports the first lateral drill hole on the Garden Shaft's north side is deflecting off a wall. The final set is being installed today, extending the shaft to 95 feet where it should intercept the tunnel running toward the Baby Blob. At H8 in the Money Pit, Terry and Charles resume drilling at the location where parchment and leather book binding were recovered in 2017 and where the team's 60-inch caisson struck a large object at 170 feet. When the object was hit, the spoils inside the caisson fell out and pushed the object deeper and to the side. The team now hopes to find pieces of that lost plug and possibly treasure if the caisson cracked the vault open. At 211 feet, a core yields silt, clay, a piece of wood, and a metal fragment that Terry speculates could be from the treasure vault, along with material consistent with the H8 plug. Marty tells Rick they should relocate the rig and drill another borehole nearby.
Carbon-14 results arrive for the wood recovered from the tunnel below the Garden Shaft. Craig reports the primary date range as 1631 to 1684, with a 34 percent probability of 1735 to 1803 and a 6.2 percent chance of 1529 to 1556. Since the earliest known searcher tunnels were not constructed until around 1860, this makes the tunnel potentially 400 years old, consistent with the first wood sample from the tunnel that also dated to the 1600s.
In the swamp, Rick, Jack, Gary, and Billy excavate a new area near the deepest part of the stone road. Billy hits a large boulder sitting atop the peat that moves easily, suggesting it was deliberately placed. Gary recovers a thick shaped board buried about two feet deep and a plank with tongue-and-groove joinery. Billy then encounters a hard stone surface on one side of his cut but nothing on the other, and Jack suggests the formation could be a ramp leading down from the road.
On Lot 5, Jack assists the archaeology team at the stone foundation. Jamie observes that one section is curving inward and the overall size is too large to be a house. Jack sifts the removed spoils and recovers pieces of brick, pottery, and glass. Jamie then discovers a compacted material containing ash, crushed shale, and gray coloring that she suspects is mortar. Jack recalls finding similar material while washing Money Pit spoils, and notes that mortar was found in the RF1 caisson in 2019, just a few feet northeast of H8. At the Interpretive Centre, Emma compares the Lot 5 sample to her database using XRD analysis and finds it does not match any mortar samples on file. When compared instead to the soil database, however, it proves an almost exact match to material from 104 feet deep in the Money Pit, specifically from boreholes C28, C18.5, and the Garden Shaft. Laird confirms the Lot 5 sample is not naturally occurring. When Alex asks whether someone deliberately placed it there, Laird says yes.
