"In the summer of 1 653 oliver cromwell was plotting to crush the royalist uprising in scotland by striking at the heart of their power" "Six heavily armed warships were sent north" "300 years later one man's obsession has revealed the tragic consequences of CromweII's mission" "For most of the year maverick archaeologist Doctor colin Martin contents himself with the cloistered routine of a" "Iecturer in maritime history at St Andrew's University" "But his real passion lies a 1 40 miles away buried beneath the shifting siIt in the Sound of mull" "I want to look today at a case study" "I want to look at a single ship wreck off Duart Point on the island of mull in the West of scotland" "And I'm looking at it not just for its own story which I think is quite interesting in its own right but rather in its example of how a ship is a kind of microcosm of its time" "I often tell my students that there's very little we do in archaeology that couldn't be done much better by quarter of an hour in the pub with one of the people whose lives we're trying to reconstruct from the past" "It's the investigation it's the thrill of the chase" "You're pulling these broken fragments of other people's lives together" "You're trying to make sense of them and through doing that you're trying to make some kind of real contact with the people who went before" "And I think that's a very fundamental human need" "I had no formal qualifications of a general educational nature" "I did very badly at school I was bone idle" "My parents despaired of me and they didn't know what would happen to me and I wasn't very sure myself" "However when I was in the Army I learnt to dive and I was lucky enough to be posted to Cyprus and I got a taste for archaeology because you couldn't you couldn't miss it there it was all over the place" "After all that I became a photo journalist until in 1 968 a remarkable man called Sid WignaII got together an expedition to look for a Spanish Armada shipwreck off the South West coast of ireland" "And I went over there and when I arrived first night in the pub he found out that not only was I a diver but also an archaeologist very much on an amateur level in both disciplines and I find myself the archaeologist on this project" "And I literally have taken it from there" "Having started out as a keen amateur" "colin is now one of the world's leading maritime archaeologists" "He has devoted the Iast seven years to a ship that sank on the rocks of mull in 1 653" "She was sent here to seize Duart castle a royalist stronghold in the aftermath of the civil Wars" "For nine bitter and bloody years" "CromweII's Army slowly tightened their grip on power fighting against King charles's battIeworn troops" "By 1 649 the King was dead and CromweII had consolidated his power" "But in scotland's Western isles the royalists continued their struggle and CromweIIwas forced to act" "With few surviving records" "colin has to gather the evidence from the seabed" "His task is made more urgent by the constant threat to the wreck from the increasing volume of large ships churning up the waters" "Every summer colin and his small team take the ferry to the isle of mull for a season's diving" "He has no high tech equipment and has to raise the funds for these annual expeditions himself" "The team under his command comes largely from his own family his two sons Ed and Pete and exstudent philip Robertson" "They're joined by fellow archaeologist Graham Scott" "colin's wife paula is the team's historian and has worked on his projects for 20 years" "We don't get a holiday but this is not a bad place to be" "It's what he wants to do" "He would be very unhappy sitting on a beach in the sunshine" "So you know if he's happy then that's fine" "It's day one and the family gather in the shadow of Duart castle to hear their mission" "well morning everybody" "Briefing for the start of the 1 999 season which is the culmination of seven years of previous work" "Just to remind you the site's location very close in shore just adjacent to the rocks of Duart Point and in the background a couple of hundred metres away" "Duart castle itself" "The main site area is enclosed within this grid which is about 35 metres by 1 7 metres" "That's the area in which we know wreckage has occurred and we believe that the bulk of the wreck is within that in that area" "This is a survey of that square" "So it's a very classic shipwreck in many ways" "ballast stones pinning down fragments of the ship's structural remains and a scatter of heavy artefacts the canons the anchor and so forth" "Okay great to see you all here for the season which I'm sure it's going to be fun and very productive" "welcome to Graham who's the new member on the team and we'II see philip the site supervisor over on the site when we get there this afternoon" "Most divers would have hung up their flippers long ago but not colin He's still very much in charge" "I suppose I'm working with one of the greats in the field so I can't help but learn a great deal" "He's very easy to work with but at the same time it is quite demanding" "The work has to be done the work has to be done at the required standards so obviously" "I've always got to keep up with that" "You know considering he's now 60 he's got boundless energy really I mean I hope I'm like that when I'm 60" "He didn't expect to be still diving at 60 but he is enjoying it He is enjoying having a the first project he has had complete control over" "and he wants to do it slowly steadily and right" "And he has much more opportunity to do that because he is in total control" "Looking after colin's safety from a makeshift cabin on the rocks is his former student philip" "If I imagine my own father at 60 climbing up the rocks I'd be quite concerned" "And it does worry me But we try as much as possible to take some of the load off him" "He saysquite openly that getting kitted up aged 60 in to his diving gear is quite hard going and that's why he's got two dressers" "Dressers and aIIpurpose assistants" "colin's sons Pete and Ed have been helping their father since childhood" "I mean they're not archaeologists and they don't want to be but one has developed photographic skills and one has got drawing skills which are extremely useful and they're very happy to make themselves useful It's a much better holiday job for them" "than you know working in a restaurant or something" "It was only by chance that the wreck was first discovered" "In 1 979 a naval diver happened to be exploring the coastline" "His name was John Dadd" "I'd only been in the water I suppose about three or four minutes" "Got down on to the bottom" "My face mask got water in so I cleared it and as I floated off the bottom" "I Iooked down and what I thought was a rock was the outline of a canon" "AII sorts of things start to go through your mind obviously and I'm no different to anybody else" "I thought you know here it is the jackpot" "And I swum on a bit more and I and pinned underneath the canon I there was a copper cauldron" "And that was quite obvious what that was so I thought well you know I'd better take this and get it away So I actually lifted the front end of the canon up dug out the copper cauldron and recovered it" "And for the Iast 20 years you know that has sat in my shed at home" "John Dadd and fellow divers raised other trophies too including this pistol plate" "It dated the wreck to the middle of the 1 7th Century around the time of the civil Wars" "But to John's untrained eye nothing he found could shed light on the identity or the significance of the wreck he had stumbled upon" "I came to realise that this was just something that was too big for me" "It needs to have experts on it to do research conservation and all the other things And I contacted colin Martin" "colin had precisely the skills and experience that John knew he lacked" "only a trained archaeologist could map photograph and identify the site" "But first he recognised how vulnerable the exposed parts of the wreck were" "Something happened at the stability of the seabed which had protected this particular wreck and started to expose material which was wonderfully well preserved but incredibly fragile" "Quite literally you know within days it wouId have been washed away" "And that's what triggered this whole project" "colin had to shore up the wreck with sandbags to stabilise the site before any retrieval work could begin" "His other problem was the lack of information about the civil War period" "How could he identify the ship and tell her story when so many records of the time had been lost" "It's rather like piecing together the scattered remains of an aviation disaster a plane that's crashed and is spread all over a wide area of landscape" "The job of reconstruction was going to be immensely difficult" "To a trained eye this jumble of planks is actually the fragile remains of a small gun carriage" "A model reveals what the piece may have looked like" "The carriage steps used to elevate the gun are clearly visible" "But excavation is made no easier by colin's rigorous working methods" "It would be very easy just to lift it We could rip it away from the concretion stick a lifting bag ten minutes work we could have that thing on the surface with all its bits and pieces disIodged broken and the whole thing would be greatly diminished" "and we're not going to do that" "If it is going to be lifted it's going to require a great deal of thought it's going to require new techniques a special container We're going to have to think through how we're going to remove it from the concretions" "which are binding it to the mass of other objects surrounding it" "If we are ever going to lift it we're going to need time to sort all that out get it right and if it comes up and if it's anything to do with me it's going to come up the right way" "that doesn't damage either it or the evidence of its surroundings" "We want to continue in the way we've started regarding this as a precious resource and we want to absolutely maximise all the information we extract from this site or leave it alone for a future generation" "To help him safeguard the site colin has had it designated a protected wreck surrounded by an exclusion zone" "But not everyone has got the message" "Some personal policing of the site is often needed" "Ahoy you're very close to or probably inside a protected area a designated historic shipwreck" "Are you aware of that It's designated as a historic shipwreck and it should be marked on your charts as restricted from anchoring" "So we'd very much appreciate it if you would move" "We've got a Iot of delicate archaeological material under here and we're pretty frightened that your anchor could damage it" "This time the trespassers are hapless tourists who take their leave without protest" "Sports divers or treasure hunters would be a much more serious threat" "It's the second week of the season and to his surprise colin has uncovered some human bones" "only when they're measured and photographed will colin lift them from their 300 year old resting place" "This is a human shoulder bone and may offer vital new information about the ship's crew" "This large wooden piece is much less willing to leave the seabed" "It's the top of a ship's lantern which would have been the crew's only source of light deep below deck" "The lantern is putting up a fight and with his two hours permitted dive time running out this is one battle that colin is not going to win" "His tug of war will have to resume another day" "Among the pieces retrieved from the wreck are fragile wooden carvings" "colin has been trying to piece together from fragments like this a bigger picture of what the ship and its crew would have looked like" "helping him is illustrator John Bowen" "In his studio near Worcester he is working on a series of reconstructions inspired by colin's discoveries" "colin sent me these and as you can see there's some wonderful carvings here" "And this one in particular interests me because it's a helmeted warrior but not all the helmet's there so it gives me the opportunity to do some reconstruction" "So what I've done is I've reconstructed the top half of the helmet as you can see it's a classical type helmet with a great plume of featherage at the back here" "And I really want to put this in the picture" "The initial drawing is based on a Dutch ship of the same sort of period called a flute" "And this was the main difference was the flute had a round back end at the stern as opposed to colin's premise which would have had a flat stern or a flat back" "Before excavations began the biggest mystery colin had to solve was the identity of the ship" "In the archives paula discovered a letter sent to" "oliver cromwell from his Scottish commander Robert LiIburn" "It reveals the fate of the expeditionary force sent to mull to subdue the royalist Scots" "while our men stayed on this island the 1 3th instant there happened a most violent storm which continued for 1 6 or 1 8 hours together in which we lost a small Man of Warre called the Swan that came from Eire and Martha and Margaret of Ipswich" "But that which was most sad was the loss of the SpeedweII of Lynne where all the men that were in her being twentythree seamen and soldiers except one were drowned" "So colin's wreck must have been of the three vessels sunk near Duart castle" "The SpeedweII the Martha and Margaret or the Swan" "But which" "A wooden carving raised from the wreck was to provide a vital clue" "This piece here has got a coronet three upright features and parts of a scrolled inscription with the letters IC and that's just the beginning of an H there" "And on the other side DIEN" "And this is part of the very familiar coronet and ostrich feathers with the Ich Dien motto which in fact is the badge of the heir apparent to the english throne" "This means that colin's ship must have started life in the King's service and been captured by CromweII's men before being sent back in to battle" "With this crucial discovery paul had returned to the archives" "only one of these three ships described by Robert LiIburn had been taken by CromweII's forces" "It was a ship built in 1 641" "Four years later while their captain was away the crew did a deal with the parliamentarians" "In a ritual handover they surrendered their arms in a pledge of support for CromweII" "Their new masters ceremoniaIIy returned their weapons and the crew sailed the ship under her new colours" "That ship was called the Swan and colin is convinced that it is her remains that now lie in the Sound of mull" "Braving the bad weather that has set in" "colin is determined to find conclusive proof that this is the Swan" "whilst he dives six days a week his family remain on standby enduring the drizzle and mist" "colin's latest discovery is a number of coins that may help him date the wreck" "Graham's excavating one of the coins and he's plotting it in and he's going to recover it in to the find's tray" "colin's filming him doing the work Seems to be quite good" "I don't think the visibility's very good but" "colin and Graham can't make out the all important markings on the coin" "Despite his eagerness to examine it further" "colin insists everything is measured and photographed first" "Right well this is the first relatively legible coin we've found which is nice" "Have we got the coin book there" "Let's see if we can identify it" "It's fairly worn it's silver" "But it is very legible There is a crowned horseman on one side and it says" "Carus charles I by the grace of god King of Great Britain" "France he was claiming everything and ireland" "So that's a very characteristic charles I coin with the horseman" "Yes See a Iot of them here have that" "Yes With have the horseman" "Its mint mark looks like a little spiky sun that's on the horseman's side" "That should tell us where it was struck and when It hasn't actually got a date marked on it That's the sun mark which indicates that it was struc in 1 645 or 1 646 and I think the sun mark is associated with Exeter" "a big stronghold of the royalist cause" "So I think this is charles I 1 645 or 1 646 and probably struck at Exeter" "well that certainly fits the wreck nicely" "It does doesn't it It's a relief" "So colin's theory is intact" "A discovery as tiny as a coin has helped place the wreck in to the exact historical period" "Just as important is the civil War weaponry found on the wreck" "Under 300 years worth of encrustation the outline of a sword or sabre is clearly visible" "It's so fragile that colin has to bandage it on to a wooden stretcher before raising it to the surface" "The sabre suggests that soldiers were on board the Swan and that at Ieast one of them died when she went down" "What is it Edward A sabre Amazing" "It's got the scabbard and everything" "It's complete Yeah The basket's there" "Yeah It's got the wee bits to hold it on like that" "And stuff" "This concretion is funny stuff because it's terribly coarse and nobly and yet you can see an awful lot of shapes in it" "And whatever that is there's a raised line right the way down until it seems to split at that point" "But oh it's great It makes a change from soggy wood as well" "The civil War was a time of vicious battles when new tools of war were invented and used for the first time" "Like the rest of CromweII's Army the men on board the Swan would have been highly disciplined and well equipped to fight" "One particularly lethal weapon has come to light this summer" "It's of special interest to Graham" "Now case shot is a form of early artillery ammunition and it wouId have been fired out of the canon in much the same way as shot gun cartridge" "These four segments and you can see they would form a hollow cylinder when fitted together" "and would have been filled with scrap metal or musket balls like these here" "And when they were fired this case would have disintegrated and the musket balls or the scrap metal would have come out" "like shotgun pellets" "The idea is not to hole or blow up the other ship it's simply to kill and maim as many soldiers and sailors on the decks of the ship as possible" "To make the musket balls even more devastating the shot was roughened a civil War version of the dumbdumb bullet" "The crew of the Swan would have been preparing to aim this firepower at their target the royalist stronghold of Duart castle" "The clan leaders had defended their formidable position for centuries and so far they had refused to yield to CromweII's forces" "This castle's been the seat of the great clan MacLean for more than 700 years and it's dominated the narrow entrance to the Sound of mull and so has controlled the seaways of the whole of this part of the Western Coast of scotland" "These castles on the seaways of scotland are medieval" "They would have withstood anything that a medieval army could have thrown at them so their dominant position overlooking the sea allowed them to control these waterways" "That all changed with the age of artillery and their very positions on the edge of the sea rendered them immensely vulnerable to ships with guns" "The MacLeans did lose the castle to CromweII's seaborn army but they've since reestabIished themselves" "The remnants of battle have now been consigned to history by the current clan chief Sir LachIan McLean" "These these old cannonbaIIs when Sir Fritzroy my great grandfather restored the castle these were actually found in the walls" "And we don't know who they were fired at" "That one I've always thought looks as if it's got a sort of little face on it sort of two eyes a nose and a mouth" "But they were found in the walls" "But none of them we think ever got through" "We'd always been part of a structure that had a king or a leading person" "And I think it's probably tradition" "And I mean the King called us out we came out" "The english were very frightened of the people who" "lived in these parts of the world Indeed they equated that all the people of the Western seaboards of Britain as the Irish They called the Scots up here the wild Irish" "They were a different culture altogether" "They lived by the clan system they were fiercely independent and they had a warrior culture" "I always think it's quite interesting because the chief at that stage was nine or ten and to think that a nine or ten year old is actually a thorn in the side of CromweII sounds slightly strange But I mean we were" "we were an irritant to them" "A very different expedition is now camped at the castle gates" "It's halfway through the dive season and colin is taking stock of the team's progress" "Is the captain down there do you know" "well I think we're we're certainly in some important person's cabin because of the Have you found any human remains" "Yes there are bones there there are quite a few human bones" "Whether or not it's all from one individual we can't say yet" "They're not articulated it's not a complete skeleton" "There's a bone here and a bone there" "So far we've got a few ribs we've got half of a pelvis and today we found another piece which is probably a scapular shoulder bone" "And bits of bits of vertebra" "Are there any signs of any clothing of an individual" "Not not yet well footwear Footwear right" "Shoes are there" "Without any bones inside though" "well we haven't actually looked that far yet" "I mean there could be a foot inside" "slowly the pieces of the jigsaw are coming together from the disparate and sometimes confusing remains more clues are emerging to help colin conjure up a picture of the ship and her company" "colin's finding ever more delicate objects fragments of shoes and scraps of leather which he's securing with tiny sandbags" "The sandbags are lovingly handstitched by paula who's struggling to keep up with demand" "The difficulty is trying to analyse these remnants which have been buried in the mud for over 300 years" "Right Edward this is the interesting one but it's again it's very fragile I think this is a bit of a leather jerkin" "There are various bits and pieces in this" "I think that looks like a bit of a clay pipe and there's a couple of bits of bone couple of bits of vertebra" "And that's in amongst it" "I reckon this is part of the chap that's wearing the thing" "Here it is" "You see the three stitch holes there quite clearly and the seams generally" "The bones do seem to be incorporated with the leather particularly the near one because you can see that it is actually trapped between these quite complex folds really squashed in and it's difficult to see how that could have happened" "unless it was the owner wearing it when it went down" "So I think this probably is the jerkin with part of the individual inside it" "It certainly is a garment rather than a shoe" "The macabre theory prompts Pete to hazard a drawing of the poor soldier who colin believes drowned wearing his uniform" "could you tell if the jacket's decorated at all or is it just" "well it doesn't look like it and we wouldn't expect it" "I mean it's pretty plain utilitarian stuff" "These guys were very sort of you know fundamentalist and there's no frippery you know" "well they were puritans weren't they" "Yeah yeah Yeah" "And maybe the arm seams here would be much more pronounced almost like a little" "Right This big thick bit of leather" "Yeah that's right" "And that's I think that's the bit we've got on the on the fragment" "Yeah" "Because I mean what we have caught up so far we've got a bit of a jacket and we've got some some shoes haven't we" "The shoes yes the shoes with the nice high heels and the square toes that's very characteristic Very civil Warish" "Right" "well that's coming on really nicely" "That's giving us an idea of how he might have looked" "But would the bones tell the same story" "The jacket which" "colin believes holds pieces of vertebra are boxed up and sent with the other remains to the Scottish national Museum to be assembled and examined by bone specialist Doctor Sue black" "unquestionably I think we're looking at a male" "This is going to be somebody between the ages of about 23 and 25 years of age" "When you come down in to his upper limb this is all we have of his upper limb which is his shoulder blade and his uIna which is the bone here on the inside of the upper the part of the lower upper limb" "You can see that most of it has got damaged" "That's not surprising because this is a very very thin plate of bone and you even find in more recent cases this doesn't tend to survive" "So to find something as intact as this and something of such antiquity is phenomenal absolutely phenomenal" "It's a beautiful specimen" "What you can see is for example there's a huge bar of bone" "I can hold the bone by this and there's a muscle attaches on there which is called subscapuIaris it's in the back and it's the muscle that's involved in pushing and in turning of the upper limb" "And it's a real forceful volume muscle" "So whatever he was doing he was doing forcefully with his upper limb" "And that's born out as well when we look at the ulna" "And particularly in this area around here" "This is the site of attachment of a muscle called brachiaIis" "And what it does is it allows you forcibly to flex at the elbow" "So there's a Iot of powerful movement at his shoulder" "There's a Iot of powerful movement at his elbow" "Whatever he was doing required a Iot of power in his upper body so that I can envisage for example a sailor hauling on the ropes pulling down with the muscles in his shoulder pulling down with the muscles on his arms" "Not the result colin was expecting" "An even bigger surprise awaits him in the lab of conservator" "Theo Skinner who has succeeded in detaching the bones from what colin thought was a soldier's jacket" "well colin I'm glad you've turned up" "would you Iike the good news first or the good news" "Oh let's have the good news" "well the good news is that these bones according to the bone specialist appear to come from the same skeleton as all the other bones" "Now that's well that's for the bad news and" "I'm afraid that this is not a jacket" "It turns out to be pieces of a shoe" "The bones had got caught in them" "What precisely made you think it was the jacket" "Was is just the vertebra" "It was largely that and not seeing fully how they as we see now the sole coming round here" "It was all sort of folded over in on itself" "It just looked like thick pieces of leather with the vertebra sort of caught up with them and I thought perhaps it was a fragment of a buff coat with part of the owner still inside" "But clearly that's not the case" "Theo's analysis forces colin in to a change of heart" "The dead man is not a soldier but a sailor" "He's disappointed but not surprised" "Each new revelation brings him closer to the truth" "Now I'm going down to england to see John Bowen who's the graphic illustrator who we've been giving a range of information from our historical sources from our archaeological sources expert advice from a number of people who know about ships of this period" "And what John has been doing is pulling all these elements together to make as close a reconstruction a hypothesis of how the Swan may have looked in 1 653" "I know that colin found some leaded glass and the only place that this would have been would be up at the stern in the captain's cabin" "So I've drawn a little" "I've put a little window in there just above the small gunports and I've given it the sort of baroque surround with lots of curly cues and what have you" "It would have been quite ornamental and not too dissimilar to the sort of decoration that would have been on the stern of the boat" "So you're really looking forward to seeing this reconstruction colin" "well I am because it's going to pull all the strands together isn't it if all the research that quite a Iot of people have been doing now yourself not least" "So this is a big moment" "Are you ready" "What does it look like" "Are you ready" "Yes I am" "Now oh wow" "Do you Iike it" "I think that's the nearest we're going to get to visualising what the scene must have been before the storm blew up" "This reconstruction helps colin to complete his picture of the ship's fate" "The Swan arrived in/ MuII on the 5th September 1 653" "The royalists had already fled so Duart castle put up no resistance" "Eight days later with the Swan quietly anchored in the bay the sky darkened and ominous storm clouds gathered" "while our men stayed on this island the 1 3th Instant there happened a most violent storm which continued for sixteen or eighteen hours together in which we lost a small Man of" "Warre called the Swan that came from Eire" "And all this in the sight of the men at land who saw their friends drowning and heard them crying for help but could not save them" "The storm tore the ship free from her anchor and the wind forced her towards the shore" "She was driven repeatedly against the rocks" "unable to withstand such a pounding she sank" "Over time her shattered remains slipped beneath the slit her name and her memory lost for 300 years" "How many men perished the night she sank is still unknown" "With the ship thumping up and down and that gulf of raging water in between would be very difficult for any individual to make it across even if he could swim and most people at that time as indeed most sailors" "in later periods just don't learn to swim" "They've got a superstition about it" "When John Dadd first discovered the wreck he had no idea what he'd found" "But now he is returning to the site full of remorse" "Treasure" "The thought of treasure went through my mind" "I thought this is it this is the jackpot" "It is so easy to go in there and just grab what you can and go and that's not the way to do it" "And of course as a layman I knew absolutely nothing about conservation or anything so the one or two items that we" "I broke open to have a look what was inside unfortunately were lost" "In one last surprise for colin John has decided to atone for his past mistakes by returning one of the archaeological pieces he removed from the site" "John it's great to see you" "colin" "welcome to Duart again" "How are you I'm very well" "How long now well" "Ten years Ten years something like that" "Yeah well Yeah yeah" "And it's 20 years ago since you found the wreck" "absolutely yeah well well well" "Time flies doesn't it So it's going to be" "Oh I'm so looking forward to this" "hello Chris hi You haven't met my wife" "hello Very nice to meet you And you After all this time" "And this is the man the expert" "This is the man Oh I've been looking for" "It's very very interesting to compare notes" "I don't know if you can remember but I've got something I want to show you actually that I've brought with me" "Yeah to return to the rightful well not the rightful owners but to put it with the rest of the things that you've" "Oh wow" "That I've had this" "Good gracious believe it or not and you know it's over 300 years of age" "Good gracious" "But it's been in my shed for 20 years" "I think that has to be the cauldron that hung over the galley the galley fire" "Yeah This would be the cook pot then would it" "This would be the cook pot" "Yeah" "I would think so" "For a ship this size because she's quite a small ship" "Yes she'd normally just have you know perhaps 40 people on board and you know porridge or soup" "Yeah yeah everything went in there" "You'd get 40 servings out of that wouldn't you" "Oh absolutely Oh crickey yeah" "I think that's what it is Yeah" "Here it is Hey" "John's diving days are over so colin has set up a monitor linked to his underwater camera enabling" "John to see again the wreck he stumbled on all those years ago" "We're just going to the anchor" "Here it is now Good grief the size of it" "The anchor just seems huge" "Just explaining that the sandbagging that he does over the exposed timbers to preserve those from erosion with the tide" "obviously very successful because there's a Iot of timber exposed there" "I've been a seafaring man all my Iife and I can just you know" "I just get a feeling for the whole thing" "It's absolutely brilliant" "As the season comes to an end the arduous daily dives seem to be taking their toll on colin" "After yet another two hours underwater in weightless conditions dragging himself on to dry land isn't getting any easier" "Even with his 60th birthday party awaiting him" "The thing about colin that I admire is that he has continued with this wreck now for a number of years" "He has himself raised the funds to do it" "Organised the whole thing whether it be coming in the winter to make sure his caravan hasn't been blown away to diving in the winter to see that the sandbags haven't moved off the wreck" "And when one talks to him about that wreck you are actually it is coming alive" "He's very happy to do everything himself if necessary" "Perhaps he's too much of a loner sometimes but that's just the way he is" "But it does mean tha t he is prepared to work very hard to get where he wants" "He wants to be there now actually working at the cliff face so to speak" "Don't know I think he'II probably be going on for quite a while" "colin's labour of love has ensured that CromweII's forgotten wreck has taken its place in the history of the civil Wars" "For colin archaeology is a passion to be shared" "Each summer he invites amateur divers to see the work in progress" "He has prepared a tour of his underwater museum that allows the divers to view the exhibits in their natural environment and reflect on the fate of the Swan and those who died on her" "I think marine archaeology is worthwhile" "I think it's demonstrated that on many occasions we have people behind us in the past and we hope we're going to have further generations in the future" "We're just part of a continuum and archaeology is trying to make some sense of that to pick up the strands that have been left behind and weave them in to some sort of coherent picture that allows us almost to talk to our ancestors"