Stuff came off the studio wall today. It looks very bare. But it's time for some new views.
First up is this wreckage map, made in 1979 with a typewriter by Roland Morris for The Museum of Nautical Art in Penzance, of all the wrecks around the Isles of Scilly. I've had it in my plan chest for several years and now seems like a good time to blu-tac it up and see where we go together. Click on the pictures to see them bigger.
Note Sir Cloudesley Shovell's grave on the top picture: he was a childhood fascination of mine. Drowned in the wreck of the flagship HMS Association on a night in 1707 (although later a woman - on her own deathbed - claimed to have strangled him for his emerald ring, when he was washed up still alive) and described as one of the biggest disasters in British naval history. Over 2000 lives lost in one night. As kids we played on his grave at Porthellick Cove on St Mary's and generally reveled in the gruesomeness of it all.
Note Sir Cloudesley Shovell's grave on the top picture: he was a childhood fascination of mine. Drowned in the wreck of the flagship HMS Association on a night in 1707 (although later a woman - on her own deathbed - claimed to have strangled him for his emerald ring, when he was washed up still alive) and described as one of the biggest disasters in British naval history. Over 2000 lives lost in one night. As kids we played on his grave at Porthellick Cove on St Mary's and generally reveled in the gruesomeness of it all.
The two wreck pictures are from John and were posted through my letterbox the other day. With a note: "…something you should wake up to after a night of storms. Found them in Zennor Museum, where heard that shipwrecks offered wooden bounty to villagers - their fires otherwise lit by cow dung and gorse."
