In the War Room, Craig Tester delivers the carbon-14 results from Beta Analytical on the two human bone fragments recovered from Borehole H-8. The Middle Eastern bone dates to between 1682 and 1736, and the European bone to between 1678 and 1764. Both predate the Money Pit's 1795 discovery and fall below the depth of any known searcher activity. For Rick Lagina, the results meet a threshold he has waited years to reach: definitive evidence of human presence deep in the Money Pit before anyone is known to have been there. The team notes that the dates are consistent with Knights Templar-related theories, particularly given one individual's Middle Eastern origin, and agrees that H-8 must be excavated on a large scale.
At the Mug and Anchor Pub in Mahone Bay, historian Doug Crowell presents research into the La Rochefoucauld family, whose name appears on the alleged 14th-century Templar map provided by researcher Zena Halpern. The Rochefoucaulds were a prominent French noble house dating to the 10th century with direct connections to the Crusades through the Lusignan family, who ruled in Jerusalem. Alex Lagina, Peter Fornetti, Charles Barkhouse, and Doug then travel to the Centre of Geographic Sciences in Lawrencetown, where they search rare Nova Scotia and Acadian documents. In a genealogy of the Dugua family, they discover that a Francois de La Rochefoucauld married into the line of Pierre Dugua, the founder of the first French colony in Nova Scotia. Dugua's personal cartographer was Samuel Champlain, whose otherwise meticulous maps conspicuously omit Mahone Bay, a 25-by-20-mile body of water containing more than 360 islands. The team considers whether Champlain was directed to leave the area off his charts to protect something hidden on Oak Island.
On Lot 16, Rick, Marty Lagina, Dave Blankenship, and metal detection expert Gary Drayton recover a piece of grapeshot, a type of cannon ammunition used in naval and land warfare dating to as early as the 15th century, along with a horseshoe fragment and an old coin that Gary believes may be another maravedi. The grapeshot raises questions about military activity on or directed at the island. Meanwhile, in the War Room, Rick and Alex connect by video with Nichola Lewis, a France-based researcher and translator specializing in 16th- to 18th-century French documents. Lewis reports that she has contacted Sonia Matossian, a member of the Rochefoucauld family who lives at the ancestral castle, and has arranged for the team to visit. Rick, Alex, and Peter Fornetti accept the invitation, hoping the family archives may shed light on the Templar map.
Irving Equipment Limited completes final preparations at the Money Pit, delivering more than 400 tons of equipment including a 35-ton bridge platform and a 50,000-pound rotating oscillator custom-built in South Korea. The oscillator will drive 50-inch steel caissons to a target depth of 200 feet, and Craig and Rick express concern about damaging fragile artifacts such as the bookbinding and bone already found at shallower depths.
Dan Blankenship, now 94, arrives at the dig site for the ceremonial start of the excavation. Marty writes "Dan's Breakthrough" on the first caisson, a tribute to the 50 years Dan has spent pursuing the island's mystery. Jack Begley climbs up to add "Forever Family" and the initials of his late stepbrother Drake Tester, who died earlier in the year. Dan presses the button to start the oscillator, and as three million pounds of torque begin driving the first caisson into the earth, the team stands united in the belief that H-8 is the original Money Pit and that the answers they have sought may finally be within reach.
