As a young husband and father, he was working far too hard. By day he was the manager of a magazine distribution company, and every other spare moment he had was spent working to shape up the grounds and other details of his newly-built home. Finally, his concerned wife Gloria could stand it no longer.

"Why don't you do something for recreation?" she suggested.

"Like what?" William (Bill) Gillies asked.

"Well, you like swimming. Why don't you get yourself some Scuba gear and go diving ?"

"Too expensive," was her husband's first reaction, but when he discovered that the equipment was affordable after all, he duly bought it.

What started as "a quiet paddle" around Bermuda's shoreline teaching himself to Scubadive ultimately became a lifelong fascination with the treasures lurking beneath our blue waters. Little did Mr. Gillies imagine, however, that in the course of pursuing his new hobby, he would also experience not only the thrill of finding some of them, but also the joy of collecting and patiently restoring many others.

When a business acquaintance suggested that Mr. Gillies link up with the late Harry Cox, an avid diver/treasure hunter and owner of the Shearwater, again his reaction was "too expensive", but on being told that Mr.Cox didn't charge Bermudians, he approached him and was accepted. However, he made it very clear to Mr. Cox that, as someone who was always interested in biology and chemistry, he was only interested in the scientific side of the coral reefs, and "couldn't care less" about shipwrecks and potential treasures, so the duo agreed that, once on site, each would pursue his own interests.

By his third dive, however, Mr. Gillies had grown tired of "looking at the same old coral", and decided to examine a wreck site. To his delight, he promptly found a little hand bell with Latin inscriptions and figures on it, which he surmised was probably used for Massachusetts

"That was in 1965 and from then on I was hooked, and Gloria hasn't seen much of me since," he says.

Just how "hooked" is perhaps best evidenced by the fact that one room in Mr. Gillies' home is devoted to this interest. One wall is lined with glass cabinets completely filled with the undersea treasures he has found, restored, or been given. Each is meticulously labelled and dated, while two other walls are lined with rows and rows of reference and other relevant books, plus boxes of slides. The most recent addition is a laptop computer to assist him in not only cataloguing his collection to comply with the recently updated Marine law, but also to write his memoirs.

Seven years after finding the little hand bell, luck was with Mr. Gillies when he again dived on the same wreck. This time he found a small jar dated circa 1550.

"It was the first one to come aboard Shearwater intact, and that made me even more curious," he says.

In what became standard practice for the amateur diver, whenever there was something found or spoken of which he did not understand, Mr.Gillies would acquire the necessary books and fill in the gaps.

His next step was learning how to recognise a wreck.

This meant being towed, along with a diving partner, very slowly behind the Shearwater while holding on a rope and peering into the depths with a face mask. When something was sighted, a signal was given, and the divers would cast off and swim down for closer inspection. Things like ship's ballast or anything in a straight line, even though barnacle encrusted or attached to a reef, were clear evidence that something had foundered there. The more wreck-spotting Mr. Gillies did, the better he became at it.

"There's nothing mysterious about it, it's just practice," he says. "The human eye is oriented towards colour, but what you really have to look at is shape because things are covered in growth that is the same colour as the rest of the reef."

Like many treasure-hunters, Mr. Gillies also learned that memorable finds don't happen every day. Over the years, he experienced many, many expeditions when nothing at all was found, and others where the finds were modest or not particularly remarkable. Therefore, he will never forget two outstanding searches, when he literally found gold and a precious stone.

The first, in July 1968, began when he spotted some ship's ballast from the surface. Free diving down his hand touched something that moved. It turned out to be an elephant's tusk. After debating what to do next, he and Mr. Cox decided to survey the site in ever-widening circles, during which some lignum vitae logs were spotted in the sand. Further investigation turned up just the logs and some broken olive jars.

By now cold and hungry, Mr. Gillies decided to return to the boat to warm up and eat something, while Mr. Cox continued diving. On rejoining him, Mr. Cox signalled he had found nothing, but minutes later a black coin (piece o' eight) tumbled down, and then a gold circlet and gold coin were found.

"By then Harry had run out of air, but I still had some left, so he took the gold and went up," Mr. Gillies says. "I indicated I wanted an air lift (a vacuum device that sucks up sand) sent down. Meanwhile, using a diving hose I fanned the sand and there was a gold chain fifteen and a half feet long, which looked as if it had been made yesterday."

An encrusted lump in the middle of the chain was later discovered to be a manicure case shaped like a woman's bust which, when opened, contained a cuticle pusher, toothpick, ear scoop and nail parer.

The find caused great excitement on Shearwater, whose crew that day included Alan Albright of the Smithsonian Institute.

"His eyes nearly popped out of his mask," Mr. Gillies remembers.

The following day the divers went down again, and this time Mr. Cox found a finely-worked gold ring, and speculation was rife as to what its missing stone might have been.

It would take two years, almost to the day the ring was discovered, and incredible luck, before the mystery was solved.

Operating an air lift on the same site, Mr. Gillies initially found nothing. Then, following a line of ballast, he came upon an enormous, upturned brain coral. Working carefully with his hands, he discovered what turned out to be a nearly-five carat emerald that subsequent research on its impurities indicated it had come from the El Chivor mine in Colombia. Moreover, it fitted into the ring perfectly.

"It was said to be worth $100,000 at the time," the diver notes.

Subsequent diving expeditions over several decades never again yielded a find of such magnitude, but Mr. Gillies didn't mind. It was enough to explore and occasionally find other interesting objects. Of course, whenever he came across something, or some terminology, with which he was unfamiliar he simply acquired the books and did the necessary research to improve his knowledge.

Learning about the diverse objects recovered from wreck sites was only part of Mr. Gillies' hobby. He always felt that the broken and fragmented objects which would otherwise be thrown away would augment his own collection, so he set about researching and studying ways to effect repairs. By trial and error, and using a variety of materials and painstaking calculations, as well as sometimes fashioning missing components himself, he became so skilled that, to the untrained eye, it is easy to believe that what one sees is entirely original. Mr. Gillies hastens to assure, however, that it has never been his intention to deceive. Rather, he believes that a complete object is visually more stimulating than shards and fragments.

Of course, before any such work begins, it is usually necessary to remove the thick encrustation that results from centuries in the sea, and that is another art which Mr. Gillies has mastered.

Small wonder, then, that the contents of his display cabinets make such compelling viewing. Everything from manillas (bangle-like metal objects used in trading in Africa), to clay pipes, various types of glass bottles, some dating back centuries; bowls, crucibles, reals (17th Century Spanish coins also known as pieces o'eight), precious corals and purple snail shells (Janthina janthina), vials, 16th Century animal bones, a whale oil lamp, bellarmine jug, 17th Century spoons, tiny ointment pots, Westerwald mugs and much, much more, are all carefully preserved or restored and arranged.

Now retired, the former wreck diver no longer enjoys going to sea to dive on wrecks.

"During a whole day out in an open boat your find muscles you didn't know you had when you get to my age," he says. "It got to be a grind, and when it's not fun any more there is no pleasure in doing it."

Nonetheless, his enquiring mind is always on the go. In addition to his continuing dedication to his hobby and never-ending thirst for knowledge, Mr.Gillies also gives illustrated lectures on his diving experiences from time to time.

Cataloguing his collection to conform with the Historic Shipwrecks Act 2001on his newly-acquired computer is a big , time-consuming task, although he does support the new legislation regarding found treasures which are part of Bermuda's natural cultural heritage.

"I think it improves the old law, and I think Government is working in the right direction. It should know what has been found and where it is, which is the idea," Mr.Gillies says.

In terms of private collections like his, he adds: "I don't think Government will take them, and I don't think it is their intention to do so. Every museum in the world has the same problem: they have too much stuff and can't display it all, which means that they have to take steps to store, look after and display it. I look at my things all the time and upgrade.

"The first thing Government should do is reassure all the divers that they are not going to confiscate their finds. Instead, I think they should ask the 'owners' to lend things for display to the public for a set period of time and then return them, so that Government is only responsible for them for the short time they are in its possession."

Mr. Gillies also feels that the average citizen who finds objects should be able to go to a common source for advice on how to preserve and restore them.