Martin Woodward on Diving

Things that appeal to me, most people want to find gold coins and gold bars and things.

To me, I’d rather find something that’s got an intrinsic value, it might be a little bit whacky or something like those little cannons in there that I’ll show you in a minute, little tiny cannons. And to give an example, they came from off the back of the Isle of Wight and it was a wreck of about 17 … the first decade of the 1700s and it was a wooden wreck so none of the structure left at all, nothing.

It’s all just bits buried under the shingle and I gradually dug up these little cannons here, I’ll pull one out to show you, which someone on board had actually made a model of the ship that they were on so you can imagine this old sailing ship, a square rigger like Victory style thing and someone on board had made a model and made all these little guns by hand, because they’re not cast because if they were cast, they would have trunnions cast in to this, so these were turned up on probably a little hand lathe by someone in 1710 or whatever but they are all to the exact scale of the actual ship’s guns and the ship they were on, so that to me, I found all of these over the space of about 20 years, digging up the seabed and they’re all different sizes and they’re all different scales to the same ones on the boat so who made them?

I’d love to know who made them. What was his name?

Fantastic, and they’ve got little touch holes and everything. So, every item tells a story and I love things like that.