Beyond Oak Island

We found shipwrecks. Artifacts.

The state of Florida went behind our back.

There is something fundamentally unfair about this.

"You find something, we're gonna not let you have it."

And it happened

with these other treasure hunts.

The Japanese were losing world war ii

and they have the golden budda

and they had to get it buried.

They found Saxon coins

- and viking jewelry. - They stood

to get three to five million dollars.

Really?

All while we were growing up,

my brother and I were fascinated

with finding treasure.

Pirate treasure,

cursed treasure.

Civil war gold.

Since then, our work on oak island

has shown us there's a world of mysteries...

- Whoa. - -...Waiting to be explored.

So, we like to reach out to other treasure hunters.

X marks the spot, right there. Brilliant.

- We want to hear their stories... - That's right.

- And share our insights. - "Ill-gotten gains."

- And who knows... - I got it.

Maybe we can help them with their search.

- Not only in America. - Wow. That is gold.

- But all over the world. - Yeah!

Beyond oak island.

So, guys, we've filled this table, like,

several times with all of the incredible finds

you've made here on oak island.

So, as it stands right now,

when you pull something exciting out, what happens?

Who gets it?

If it's an artifact, the government has dibs on it.

- They don't have to take it. - Right, but items

that have significance deemed by them,

it's necessary to give those items,

turn those items over to the province.

But if we find jewels

in their non-natural state

and metals in their non-natural state,

we're entitled to 90% of the value of it.

But there might be

a dispute between "artifact" and "treasure."

So, there runs the risk...

From what I'm hearing from you... is, okay,

"you guys get to keep treasure, fine.

"We want the historical stuff," basically.

But they could say, "hey, that Templar gold cross",

- "that's a piece of history, so give that to us."

yes.

Yes, so it's a little bit fuzzy on the edges..

You know, it's a little disconcerting,

'cause I can see how this can get complicated really fast.

You know, I think of that phrase, when we were kids,

finders keepers, losers weepers.

You know what I mean? Like, you could find it,

but not be able to keep it. That's...

I-I can give you a real-world example, Matty.

You know, rick and I have been fascinated

with treasure hunting. That's no secret.

Since we were boys.

And over the years, I've invested

in some other ventures, and one in particular

makes a really good story... exactly on the point

you're talking about... and that is

what happens when you actually find something?

Who is the one who keeps?

What is it?

This could be something big.

Whoa.

In 2013,

while searching for metal objects in the oak island swamp,

rick, Marty and members of their team

were excited to find what appeared to be

an old Spanish coin.

What the hell is that?

It's a Spanish maravedí.

Yes!

Well, we got a lot riding on this little coin.

Let's take a look under the microscope.

Early the next year,

they brought the coin to be cleaned and examined

at global marine exploration, a Florida-based company.

Clearly, this leads me to believe that this thing

did spend, several hundred years

- in the swamp. - That's good.

It was during their visit to global marine

that Marty and rick were introduced to bobby pritchett,

the company's owner, a man with vast experience

locating artifacts and sunken treasure off the Florida coast.

I started diving in my 20s, and I liked it so much

that it just became not an obsession,

but, you know, just something

that I wanted to do for a living.

I went and met and interviewed

with as many different treasure hunters as I could,

and they were fascinating people.

And, it kind of hooked me right in.

And from that point on,

I just kept going out and looking for wrecks.

And eventually, we got contracts to do the work.

Bobby pritchett's first contract took him

to the Dominican republic in October of 2010.

We were immediately successful.

We found many shipwrecks. Lots of artifacts.

Several months later, we had another contract

for the east coast of the Dominican republic.

And again, we were immediately successful

finding several shipwrecks,

and worked one specifically called pewter wreck.

Narrator for bobby pritchett, the so-called pewter wreck

came in the form of a mid-16th century merchant ship,

probably Spanish, that yielded the single largest cache

of 16th-century pewter tableware ever discovered.

It was a sunken treasure worth millions of dollars.

Beautiful, beautiful 500-year-old pewter

that we were able to recover and conserve

a large amount of it. In fact,

some of it's actually in the queen's palace in England.

So that's pretty cool.

Bobby's success in the Dominican republic

encouraged him to start his own treasure salvage company.

The purpose of global marine

was to go out and do the research,

survey, locate shipwrecks, identify what's there

and then recover what we found.

Do conservation work on it

and either turn it in to the museums

or turn it in to the auctions.

Among the potential investors in bobby's first solo venture

were oak island treasure hunters

Marty lagina and Craig tester.

We went and visited them.

And they seemed very competent.

They showed us around the stuff they'd found.

And they just happened to be looking

for investors at the time,

so, Marty and I decided to jump on board.

Besides the enormous costs,

diving on wrecks in the ocean presents a number of other

even more daunting challenges.

It's very dangerous.

Especially if you're not trained to use the equipment,

being out on the open sea,

a swell could come up and it could capsize the boat.

And then you have to worry about the sharks in the water.

And barracuda.

People can die.

But in spite of all of the various financial,

legal and maritime obstacles

Bobby pritchett was convinced

that global marine could be a success.

We went and visited sir Robert Morris,

who is the godfather of archeology and treasure hunting.

And he showed us a lot of research that showed

the mass amount of shipwrecks

that should have been at cape Canaveral.

Because of the shoals

that are offshore of cape Canaveral,

these ships that would be passing by,

coming up from Cuba and other places,

coming up the new Bahama channel

and going back to Europe, these shoals

were so far offshore they thought that

they were in deeper water.

They would just wreck.

So, we started looking at cape Canaveral

and asking the state of Florida for permits.

Bobby, who does things right,

needed money to do it right.

He had the permits, but he needed money to outfit his ship,

his boat, with the proper equipment.

And so, we made a deal.

Craig and I advanced quite a large sum of money

and joined the search.

Everyone knows about these Spanish ships carrying

all this looted treasure from the new world back to Spain.

And the numbers are astounding.

I mean, what these things carried.

In today's money, easily a billion dollars per ship.

After scouring the ocean bottom

over the next several years,

bobby pritchett and his partners

finally hit pay dirt.

We were finding a lot of possible hits,

some large ones that could be cannons, and end up finding

five or six locations that were, ships, so it was great news.

It's like, "man, I can't believe it. We just found it."

I mean, it's quite amazing.

Archeologists confirmed

that the team had found the untouched remnants

of five shipwrecks.

The only questions left now were how to retrieve it

and how much was it all worth?

We had four archeologists come in,