This week on The Curse of Oak Island, the team makes even more progress at the Money Pit as they uncover more gold with possible links to the ancient Inca Empire.
After a really sluggish and not very fruitful season last year, the search at the Money Pit has been rejuvenated in a massive way. The discovery of gold and silver in water samples taken from underground caused the guys to increase their efforts to find the long-lost Money Pit.
The team has been drilling in and around the old C-1 shaft and in an area that was previously unexplored, and they’re getting some good hits. They’re finding super-old wood that indicates pre-searcher shafts and tunnels, and in the D-2 borehole, they even found a piece of metal that contained a significant amount of gold.
And now they’ve found more. On last night’s episode, the guys pulled up another small piece of metal at a depth of approximately 75 feet. This is a much shallower depth than they would be expecting to find anything; the guys generally concentrate their efforts around the 90 feet mark.
The piece was so encrusted with dirt that it was impossible to tell what it was; luckily, the guys now have an XRF Machine to let them know the chemical composition of artifacts.
They put the object into the X-Ray fluorescence machine, and it came back as mostly iron but also contained a significant quantity of gold too. Marty, always a bit of an impatient fellow, demanded that they get the piece to an expert by “yesterday.”
Oak Island team now have two pieces of gold
Later, the team was joined in the War Room by expert chemist Christa Brousseau who had more exciting news for the gang. She informed them that the new piece was covered in several gold flakes. And that the gold matches the composition of the previous piece found in the nearby D-2 borehole.
This means that both pieces contain a portion of copper, a style of gold that was very common with the ancient Inca civilization in South America. This Incan gold was often melted down by Spanish conquistadors into bars known as Tumbaga gold.
Cue mass excitement all around as the guys start to dream that they may be close to locating a secret stash of ancient looted Spanish gold.
There have long been theories that a rogue Spanish or Portuguese sea captain may have buried a secret horde of treasure on Oak Island, and recent finds have added fuel to those theories.
Is there a secret chamber hidden on Oak Island? Is the Money Pit a decoy?
So, why are the guys finding pieces of gold at such shallow depths and away from anywhere previously documented as a possible location for treasure? Marty has a theory.
He reckons there might be a secret “offset chamber,” which is located at a different depth and position than all other theories have suggested. Marty argued that the Money Pit may be an actual decoy, and that this is the true location. This theory was echoed by historian Charles Barkhouse and would help explain why all their treasure hunting predecessors have been unsuccessful.
The idea that there’s a secret tunnel is definitely given credence by the fact that they keep finding hand-cut pieces of wood that indicate tunnel-like structures. Furthermore, some of this wood was recently dated to the late 1400s, exactly when the conquistadores were most active.
Hopefully, the guys will get some steel caisson shafts in the ground, as quickly as possible.
The Curse of Oak Island airs at 9/8c on History.