Rare shipwreck archive on sale at Sotheby's

An unparalleled archive of shipwreck images will be presented for sale at Sotheby’s London auction on 12th November 2013. 

Taken by four generations of the Gibson family of photographers over nearly 130 years, the 1,000 negatives record the wrecks of over 200 ships and the fate of their passengers, crew and cargo as they travelled from across the world through the notoriously treacherous seas around Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly between 1869 and 1997. 

At the forefront of early photojournalism, John Gibson and his descendants were determined to be first on the scene when these shipwrecks occurred. Each wreck had its own story to tell – the news of which the Gibsons would disseminate to the British mainland and beyond.

The original handwritten eye-witness accounts as recorded by Alexander and Herbert Gibson in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries will be sold alongside these images.

The archive will be sold as a single lot in Sotheby’s Travel, Atlases, Maps and Natural History sale, and is estimated to achieve between £100,000 and £150,000.

Author John Le Carré, made the following comment when he visited the Gibsons of Scilly archive in 1997.

‘We are standing in an Aladdin’s cave where the Gibson treasure is stored. It is half shed, half amateur laboratory, a litter of cluttered shelves, ancient equipment, boxes, printer’s blocks and books.

‘Many hundreds of plates and thousands of photographs are still waiting an inventory. Most have never seen the light of day. Any agent, publisher or accountant would go into free fall at the very sight of them.’