Martin Woodward on Diving

This has got a great story. This was off … I was just diving … I tend to … like any job you get a nose for where is the right place to look and sometimes I dive on areas of barren seabed where there’s no sign of any shipwreck and just literally do it systematically with a metal detector.

I was diving one day on a flat piece of seabed with a few boulders and a lot of gravel and I dug that up, I dig one of those up and I found quite a few of them in the ensuing days but I couldn’t work out why they were there because there was no wreck there. When I got them home, I looked carefully at the … and if you look on that look you will see right on the base there will be a little … the base of the head. Pretty certain, yeah, I’m certain its on there.

If you look on that, on the base on the neck you’ll see a little initial, an ‘S’ and that gave me a clue about the fact that they are British sovereigns, but they are minted in Australia, so they were Australian British sovereigns. You see that little ‘S’? So I thought well, what’s got an Australian connection with this area and there was a wreck a few hundred yards away that had gone in 1879 and beaten to pieces on the rocks and when I looked further into the story of it, and the Board of Trade enquiry about the loss and they always have an enquiry, I dug up that when the waves were sweeping this … it was literally being swept, it was onshore, on the rocks and the waves were beating on and they had bad weather, the crew were trying to get off and they were trying to get a line ashore and the locals were trying to help them, and the Carpenter who was on the deck with the young Cabin Boy called Willie Butt, and he was only 14, he said, “Willie, go down below and get my bag, it’s got my money in it” so Willie went down below and retrieved the Carpenter’s bag because the Carpenter didn’t want to go down and get it himself, obviously, and the Cabin Boy came up and on deck, a big wave came along, swept him off the ship clutching this bag, and he got swept away from the ship, and that’s what that money is.

That’s the money, ‘cos it can’t be anything else ‘cos they’re Australian mint mark and that’s the only Australian ship that came in and it’s the only story that will fit.

So, what you’re holding is a bit of history there, a bit of tragic history because the boy shouldn’t have died really, if he hadn’t been sent down below, it wouldn’t have happened.