On Oak Island, crews from ROC Equipment and Soletanche Bachy Canada, with Adam Embleton and Billy Gerhardt, repair the Money Pit area for another eight-foot-diameter steel shaft targeting the solution channel, where soil sampling has identified high silver at roughly 200 feet, scientifically matched to a 14th-century Portuguese coin reportedly brought up in the 1849 drilling. A few yards away on Lot 8, Marty Lagina joins archaeologist Laird Niven and Fiona Steel at the stone cradle uncovered beneath the 40,000-pound boulder earlier in the season. Marty digs an adjacent trench to test whether the cradle covers something deeper and strikes slate bedrock at a level noticeably higher than the base of the cradle. Because eastern bedrock runs flat and uniform, the drop-off is strong evidence that the cradle sits inside an earlier excavation and may cap a man-made shaft.
Over 2,000 miles southeast on the Portuguese island of Terceira, Rick Lagina, Alex Lagina, Doug Crowell, Peter Fornetti, researcher & author Corjan Mol, and researcher Emiliano Sacchetti meet historians Francisco Nogueira and Manuel Gandra at the Igreja Matriz de São Sebastião, the Mother Church of Saint Sebastian, in Vila de São Sebastião. The church dates to 1455, roughly 150 years after the 1307 Templar suppression, built under the Order of Christ, the Portuguese successor founded in 1318 by King Denis. In one of its chapels, three of its four corners carry three-pronged goose paw carvings, one of them still bearing original red pigment. On the Camino de Santiago, (the Way of St, James) pilgrims scratched the symbol into the door of their destinations to mark the end of their pilgrimage. Corjan has shown the team matching symbols at the Templar caves of Camerano in Italy and carved into a rock in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, 50 miles from Oak Island. Corjan frames the route the team has been tracing: from Jerusalem through the Mediterranean basin to Portugal and the Azores, possibly to North America and Oak Island.
The team then travels to the Serreta region of Terceira to compare the island's dry-stone walls against the distinctive wall on Lot 26 of Oak Island. Large edge boulders bracketing a core of smaller rubble appear identical to the Oak Island example, which Francisco Nogueira has attributed to Portuguese-Azorean builders. Carbon dating places the Serreta walls at roughly 1470 to 1475, matching the Lot 26 timeline. Prince Henry the Navigator, a senior member of the Order of Christ, officially claimed the Azores for Portugal in 1427, though the order may have been operating there from the mid-1300s.
At the Angra do Heroísmo Museum, the team meets archaeologist Tiago Rodrigues. Corjan points to a carved stone dated 1454, the oldest known carved stone in the Azores, whose central symbol closely resembles the copper artifact recovered on Lot 8 in 2022 and a motif seen in a 12th-century Templar-related manuscript examined in Reykjavík in 2023. Doug presents three Oak Island artifacts for Rodrigues's assessment: a stoneshot consistent with 14th-century Portuguese use, the Ferdinand I silver coin minted between 1367 and 1383 and reportedly brought up on the drill bit in the 1849 Money Pit operation, and a deck spike recovered by Jack Begley in 2023 from the rounded stone foundation on Lot 5. Rodrigues identifies the spike as unmistakably Portuguese and possibly 14th-century, echoing findings supplied by Maltese military historian Matthew Balzan on the swamp hand cannon fragment.
Back on Oak Island, Marty joins Gary Drayton, Billy Gerhardt, Laird Niven, and Scott Barlow on Center Road near the western edge of the swamp to test whether the modern track overlies the sand-covered cobblestone road uncovered earlier in the season. A first cross-section proves inconclusive owing to surface contamination, but a second trench a few yards down exposes clean sand aligned with the road's projected path. Gary recovers an iron nail, possibly an oxshoe nail matching an earlier find in the sand road, to be analyzed by Emma Culligan at the lab. The working conclusion is that Center Road predates the 1762 survey and once connected Lot 5 to the Money Pit via the sand road and the so-called Portuguese Road into the southeast corner of the swamp.
