One English Family Took Photos of Shipwrecks for More Than a Century

Now it’s the negatives themselves that need to be saved from time and the elements.


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The waters off the coast of southwestern England are notoriously treacherous. For centuries, sailors who attempted to navigate the currents found themselves dashed against the rugged coastline of Cornwall and entrapped by the submerged rocks that guard the Isles of Scilly; some 1,000 vessels are believed to lie beneath the waves around the islands today. Thanks to one family—five generations of the Gibsons of Scilly—there is a photographic record of hundreds of these dramatic shipwrecks and the heroic efforts undertaken by locals to save the crews and retrieve their cargo.



“Within the photographs, you have stories of rescue and salvage and plunder,” says Jeremy Michell, a curator at the National Maritime Museum in London. A decade ago, the museum acquired about 1,800 images from the family at auction. That’s when a new story of rescue began: the glass and film negatives, some more than 140 years old, were rapidly deteriorating. Something had to be done to preserve the history the Gibson family had captured, often in harsh and dangerous conditions.



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