Look at that.
Pretty cool, eh?
Yeah, it is massive.
NARRATOR: Marty Lagina and his business partner Craig
Tester arrive at Smith's Cove.
Hey guys. How are you?
Good.
You both got it.
Pretty much.
Pretty much done.
So pretty quick we'll be able to remove this,
and then we get over to that stuff,
and then we can excavate here.
Is that right?
Yeah, exactly.
It's going to be interesting to get under it.
NARRATOR: Now that the entire slipway is exposed,
archaeologist Laird Niven will photograph
and meticulously record the details of the structure.
The team will then carefully disassemble it in order
to search the area beneath it for artifacts
or possible clues.
You can see it on the other side?
- Oh yeah. - Yeah.
Yeah, at low tide it's visible, yeah.
[inaudible].
Yeah, it's pretty big for a slipway, certainly the ones
we're used to.
For hauling-- just hauling up your little fishing boat,
It's a lot larger.
Yeah.
The other thing is they're really too close.
To haul a ship up, you only need one every three or four feet.
Well yeah, but a cart full of gold
you'd need them every-- right?
Just to strengthen it?
Yes because the wheels would be
way closer together and stuff.
I guess my question is why use a slipway as
opposed to a wharf?
So there are some people who feel that they
want to keep things secret.
So it's very-- it's a low, almost no profile.
NARRATOR: Is it possible that the slipway was actually
a sort of secret wharf, one used not for the docking of ships
but rather as a ramp to offload something of value
onto Oak Island?
And if so, what else might the team
find buried underneath this mysterious structure?
The slipway is clearly a rather massive structure.
It appears to be quite old.
Doesn't have a lot of iron in it.
It clearly looks like it was used to load or unload
something for this island.
Well, a whole bunch of somebodies
thought this was really important.
It's pretty much the biggest mystery, isn't it?
It's a massive undertaking down here and hardly any detritus.
And the majority of it is actually coming from here--
Right here, yeah.
--as Gary suspected.
Well, it will be interesting to dig a little deeper here--
Yeah.
--and see what you find.
No, absolutely.
All right, well, let's keep going.
All right.
Carry on, man.
Talk to you later.
NARRATOR: As archaeologist Laird Niven
begins to carefully dig beneath the slipway area,
metal-detection expert Gary Drayton continues to search
the spoils for possible clues.
[beeping]
Here we go.
Hmm, interesting.
That looks like a hinge.
That looks like an oldy.
What's an hinge doing down here?
It's not gold, but it's interesting, almost
like an old wrought-iron hinge.
That is cool.
What do you make of the iron?
That's nice.
I don't know if it's off a door, a chest, or whatever,
but that's a substantial hinge piece.
What I make of that is that it's old.
How many verys?
I can give you at least a couple of very, very olds.
It might even be very, very, very old.
Really?
NARRATOR: An iron hinge possibly from a chest
and found more than six feet deep beneath the seabed?
Could it have been part of a container used
to bring something of great value
onto Oak Island centuries ago?
You imagine the pin that went in there.
I mean, that is cool.
It is cool.
Do you think that's a square hole?
It's tough to tell, isn't it, the way its angle.
But this looks broken off at the end here.
Yeah.
So it had to be at least this long.
I mean, that's a huge length to put on even a chest.
Looks like there's a little more out there somewhere.
Yeah.
Something like this really opens the door
to finding something else.
Yep.
Well, one thing's for sure.
We can bring this to get compositional analysis done
on it.
The hinge Gary found was very interesting.
It did look very old.
I mean, the metal itself seemed to be hammered at some point
in time in layers like that.
So we can find experts that might tell us,
you know, what it was used for, what time period it was used.
So we just got to follow up on that.
All right, mate, I'll try and find whatever--
Associated with it.
That's a pretty cool hinge.
It is.