In the Portuguese Azores, Rick Lagina, Alex Lagina, Peter Fornetti, Doug Crowell, and Emiliano Sacchetti join researcher Corjan Mol and local historian Francisco Nogueira at Nossa Senhora da Conceição (Our Lady of the Conception) on the island of Terceira, a 15th century church tied to the Order of Christ, the Templar successor organization in Portugal. Inside, Corjan points out a carving very similar to a goose paw, made up of three nails of the cross. The Knights Templar carved the goose paw at sacred sites across the Middle East and Europe between the 12th and 14th centuries. The team has previously documented the same symbol at Camerano in Italy (also consisting of three nails), at the nearby Igreja de São Sebastião (Church of Saint Sebastian), and at a site on the beach in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, less than fifty miles from Oak Island. Alex notes an elongated cross beside the carving, similar in proportion to Nolan's Cross.
On Oak Island, Marty Lagina and Katya Drayton metal detect through spoils piles south of the Money Pit on Lot 18, material left by treasure hunter Robert Dunfield, whose 70-ton crane sank a 100-foot-diameter crater to 143 feet in 1965 before seawater flooded the hole. Dunfield never searched the spoils. They recover a small fleur-de-lis shaped fragment that Marty recognizes as identical to a French cap badge piece Gary Drayton, Jack Begley, and Peter Fornetti recovered on Lot 21 in 2018, on the opposite side of the island. Marty connects the artifact to Isaac de Razilly, a French Knights of Malta officer who established a fort at LaHave, fifteen miles south of Oak Island, in 1632.
At the megalithic complex of Grota do Medo, near Terceira in the Azores, the team meets Dr. Felix Rodrigues, a historian who has studied the site for over fifteen years and believes its features predate the official Portuguese settlement of the islands in 1439. Walking the ground, Rick spots a large stone with a line of long, evenly spaced carved indentations, almost like a zipper. The deliberate pattern of longer indentations and shorter intervals echoes the arrangement of stones around the Lot 8 boulder on Oak Island. A nearby small-diameter water basin cut into stone, which Rodrigues dates to the late 1100s, draws comparison to the Lot 26 well, where Dr. Ian Spooner dated organic material at the bottom to between 1028 and 1172. Both features fall roughly three centuries before the Azores were officially discovered, and during the height of Templar influence.
Back on Oak Island, archaeologists Fiona Steele and Laird Niven walk Marty through the stone feature on Lot 5 that had originally been read as a 20th century well. The newly exposed structure now appears to be a deliberately buried foundation wall, comparable in construction to the rounded foundation excavated earlier on the same lot. Steele and Niven describe two probable occupations of the area, with the new feature matching the earlier phase, and note that Lot 5's hidden setting close to the shore and the Money Pit would have suited anyone arriving by ship.
Back on Terceira, the Azores team meets Portuguese numismatist Alberto Silva at the Luís da Silva Ribeiro Public Library and Regional Archive to examine the 14th century silver coin reportedly extracted from the Money Pit by foreman James Pitblado in 1849. Silva narrows the minting window to no later than 1371, places the piece in the reign of Order of Christ patron King Ferdinand I, and confirms that fewer than a hundred examples are known worldwide despite a much larger original mintage. Coin expert Sandy Campbell had previously valued a single example near twenty thousand dollars. If many more were produced and only so few are known, where is the rest? After the team returns to Oak Island and reports the trip's findings to Marty and Craig Tester in the war room, attention shifts to MP-1, the year's final caisson, sited between the Karma-1 and Top Pocket Find shafts where silver concentrations and wood fragments were recovered earlier in the season. Gary Drayton, Terry Matheson, Billy Gerhardt, surveyor Steve Guptill, and crews from SB Canada and ROC Equipment break ground as the season's last dig begins.
