I've asked before but no one knew I assume.... but, what the hell is a "treasure vault"? And I wonder what lead them to believe now there are 2 stacked upon one another?
When they use that term on the show, I've always taken it as shorthand for "a previously described enclosure that may have treasure in it", and is used primarily for the so-called Chappell vault and, for lack of a better term, the Truro vault(s). These two instances were not observed directly with searcher eyeballs but were sussed out by means of the auger (oops I spelled it wrong earlier) drills bringing samples up.
In the case of Truro, in 1849, from one vertical drill hole they brought up evidence starting at 98 feet (matching the Onslow company's probed wooden platform at that depth) of five inches of spruce, followed by a gap of twelve inches, then four inches of oak, then, as described by the drill operator from the way the bit went down, five inches of "loose metal" or metal in pieces, then eight inches of oak, twenty-two inches of loose metal, four inches of oak, six inches of spruce, and finally seven feet of clay. From this data they gathered that it was two oak boxes/chests/vaults/whatever with four inch thick walls,
one stacked atop the other, inside an outer enclosure of five- to six-inch walled spruce. This spruce "room" I guess could also be described as a vault.
Added together that's 5+12+4+5+8+22+4+6 = 66 inches or 5'6", added to the 98 foot start depth equals roughly 103.5 feet to the bottom of the last layer of spruce. Additional drill holes (all this is in the Money Pit proper, by the way) hit the upper and lower wood "platforms" at 98 and 104 feet without encountering the other material, implying there's significant space to the sides of the stacked oak enclosures.
Legit questions raised by this data include were there also spruce sidewalls, making for a fully enclosed "box" or room (and therefore somewhat more protected), or just a ceiling and floor? And can a pod-auger really accurately show those kinds of details, including "gaps" in material? Thus my suggestion in a different post regarding using antique augers on some modern test lumber to see how this evidence could have looked. While I will grant that those employed to use the drills were probably skilled in their use, there may be some physical limitations to what data can come up vs. what is inferred. In a very cursory image search, for example, all the versions of augers with enclosures that I could find only enclosed the last couple of feet at most. Does that imply they had to keep bringing the drill up every few inches of progress to inspect the samples?
The Chappell vault was found in 1897 by the Oak Island Treasure Company in the Money Pit. At approximately 153 feet several drill holes encountered "cement" followed by inches of oak, other material, then more cement, leading to a conclusion of a cement outer casing to a wooden box, i.e. a "vault".
Other than modern basement-level bank vaults, what are the historical precedents for finding treasure caches inside wooden or other enclosures underground? When they find Anglo-Saxon hoards in fields in parts of Britain, for example, does the stuff show evidence of having been inside of containers, or is it just loose in the soil? I seem to recall that American Civil War era money caches were sometimes found in buried glass jars. You detectorists can hopefully chime in on those type questions.
--GT
