Million Dollar Point

Luganville · Espiritu Santo · Vanuatu

Million Dollar Point is one of diving's strangest stories. At the end of World War II, the US military maintained an enormous logistics base on Espiritu Santo in what was then the New Hebrides. When the war ended, the military faced the problem of what to do with mountains of surplus equipment: trucks, jeeps, bulldozers, cranes, forklifts, tractors, and every conceivable piece of military hardware. They offered it all to the colonial government at a fraction of its value. The colonials refused, betting they would get it for free. The Americans called their bluff. Over several days in 1945, they drove everything off the edge of the shore and into the sea. Eighty years later I walked into the water from a coral rubble beach on the eastern shore of Santo, wearing fins and a mask, and within three metres of the shoreline I was swimming over the roof of a six-wheeled military truck. Its cab was crushed flat but the cargo bed was intact, colonised by fire coral and small branching Acropora colonies. Fish darted through the rusted chassis: anemonefish guarding a bubble-tip anemone attached to the engine block, damselfish defending coral patches on the wheel arches, a lionfish hanging motionless in the shadow of the axle. Descending the gradual slope was like touring a post-apocalyptic car park. Jeeps sat in rows, their steering wheels and dashboards still recognisable beneath layers of encrusting coral. A bulldozer rested on its tracks at fifteen metres, the blade raised as though frozen mid-push, soft corals growing from every surface in purple and pink. Forklift tines pointed skyward at twenty metres. Glass Coca-Cola bottles, their shapes unmistakable, lay scattered across the sand between vehicles, some with coral growing from their necks.