Jean Richer, the Astronomer Sent to Acadia
In 1670, a French astronomer sailed to Acadia on a ship confiscated from Nicolas Fouquet. He spen...
Charles Barkhouse Picks a Spot
In Season 3 Rick Lagina let Charles Barkhouse, the Mahone Bay historian who has spent decades in the island's records, choose a drill site. Barkhouse picked a point just north of the previous year's borehole, where he believed the original Money Pit lay. Driller Jordan Rogers put the hole down; early returns were black, foul-smelling wood that Dan Henskee, Dan Blankenship's long-time helper, judged very old.
At 171 feet the drill dropped and kept falling. The void ran from 171 to 192 feet, 21 feet of open space below bedrock, which the record puts at 160 feet. From the muddy returns Jack Begley, Craig Tester's stepson, picked out a small non-ferrous object with three slash marks and what looked like plating. A pipe-inspection camera then showed, at 171 feet, a shiny gold-colored object embedded in the wall of the void, with a second piece of metal nearby.
The Caisson Breaks Through
Reaching it meant eighteen stories of steel. In 2016 an Irving Equipment oscillator ground caissons a little over 40 inches wide into the ground, first at Valley 3, then at C-1, 20 feet to the northwest. When the drill punched through the ceiling of the void, the crew reported a clear hole all the way down, and the team understood that the object now lay on the floor roughly 192 feet below.
The first camera found clear water and a shiny spot on the wall that looked like chips of anhydrite or quartz; Randall Sullivan, on the island that summer, records Craig Tester's view that it was the camera's light on anhydrite. At 177 feet the lens entered black silt. A BlueView sonar mapped a void running off in several directions; its operator Blaine Carr told Sullivan one corridor met the shaft at a near-perfect right angle, which he took as a sign of human work.
Three Dives and Two Answers
John Chatterton, the wreck diver who had reached the bottom of 10-X the season before, made the first descent into C-1 and stood on soft clay at a little over 170 feet. He reported walls with a rough, chipped texture rather than the smooth surfaces of water-worn rock. His partner Mike Huntley went down with a metal detector and got two hits in the floor rubble and what felt like a smooth block of metal in the wall that he could not pry loose. Chatterton returned with the same detector and got nothing. He put the chance of the void being man-made as very small, while allowing that the chipped walls did not look purely natural. The team concluded the object was probably buried under feet of clay.
Water That Runs Between Holes
After nine months of settling, a Season 5 camera found the clearest water yet and anomalies on the floor: a hook-shaped object, a woven mesh, and what appeared to be chain links. Enhanced footage of the original object looked more like metal than reflection. Huntley dived again, chiseled at a hit in the wall, overran his time and went into a hyperbaric chamber; his sediment bag held nothing. Then Geotech drilling nearby sent a torrent of water up out of C-1, proof the holes communicate at depth, and dives ended for the season. In Season 6, red dye pumped into C-1 surfaced at Smith's Cove. In Season 8 a camera showed three gold-colored anomalies in the walls, and diver Tyler Newton scraped at one until a coin-like piece fell beyond his reach. Water from C-1 and the C-1 Cluster of holes around it later tested positive for gold and silver, while C-1 sediment came back low in metals.
A Shine Nobody Has Held
The record supports a 21-foot void under bedrock, repeated camera images of something that shines in its walls, metal-detector hits that one diver got and another did not, and water carrying traces of gold. It does not supply the object itself, or settle whether the void was chipped by hand or dissolved out of the anhydrite. The thing Charles Barkhouse saw on a screen in Season 3 may lie under the clay a few feet below where Chatterton stood. Nobody has brought it up.
Sources
- Randall Sullivan, The Curse of Oak Island: The Story of the World's Longest Treasure Hunt
