The collection presently stands at between 600 and 700, date as far back as the mid-1700s and are so valuable you couldn't put a price tag on them.

It's not someone's stamp collection or coin collection, but the bottle collection owned by Peter Bromby Sr.

Actually, he also collects stamps and coins, too, and has a love for gardening, but the rare bottles which adorn his Hamilton Parish home are his main passion.

They come in all shapes, sizes and colours and he can give you the history of all of them. Most were collected around Bermuda, either under water or in and around old Bermuda homes.

"I used to dive for them or go around to old properties and dig them up," said Bromby, 73.

Anybody who knows noted diver Teddy Tucker knows that he doesn't do things in half measures. The same goes for Bromby, who just happened to spend a number of years diving with Tucker, one going after valuable artifacts, the other old and valuable bottles.

"I got quite a few of the bottles when I used to dive with Teddy Tucker," Bromby revealed.

"I dived with him for many years and got quite a few nice bottles from different places."

Bromby's respect for Tucker was evident as he spoke of his longtime friend.

"He's very clever, Teddy, very knowledgeable of the sea, ocean and everything else," said Bromby.

"I used to love going out with him, I felt safe with him. Even when we went fishing and got caught in a stiff gale, I knew we were coming home. He was a master of the sea and taught me everything I know about boating, diving and fishing."

Bottles are everywhere in Bromby's home and he also has a collection at the Maritime Museum, which he donated in 1983. Bottle collection has been an obsession of his for over 40 years and so discriminating has his taste become that any bottle dating after the 1920s is too young to make it into his collection.

"Bottles are just like you and I, they all rot and fall away," Bromby stated. He picked up a bottle dating back to 1880 to illustrate his point.

"See that glass in there, all rolling around, it is rotting from the inside," said the collector.

"It's a three-piece mould, 1880 and rutting. What causes rot in a bottle is the basic ingredients of glass which is soda, sand and lime. When the batches were put together to pour the molten glass, there was either a shortage of sodium, a shortage of lime or too much sand or something like that.

"They would react against each other and cause a destruction of the glass. A lot of them have the pretty colours on them, which is done by the sun's violet rays going down through the sand where the bottles are lying and cause them to colour like rainbow colours.

"That's where I found a lot of these bottles, deep down in the sand. Mainly around the bays, but everybody has done it so I guess the bays are pretty clean now. There may still be some places where I could find bottles if I wanted to."

Bromby's most recent piece was picked up by his wife Silvia during a trip to England. The two met through another of his other passions, stamp collecting, and corresponded as pen pals for about five years before she came to Bermuda on vacation in 1994. They were married in 1997. Silvia speaks several languages and is a former professor of languages in her native Mexico.

'I was collecting postage stamps from Islands whereas Peter was collecting the world," she explained. We had a common pen pal in Brazil and she was passing stamps that I was giving to her to Peter and was getting Bermuda stamps that were so exotic to me. Eventually she said 'I have what I want, if you want to exchange with this person I can give you the address'.

"For two years it was strictly exchanging stamps and it was after two or three years that a spark of romance began flowing in the air."

Bromby has several books to help him identify the bottles and their ages, like the 'Inner Temple' sealed bottle, dated 1850, which Silvia got for him at a flea market in England during a trip there.

"I used to get a lot of people calling me all the time, they would find a bottle and wanted to know if it was worth this or worth that, but I'm not into valuing bottles," Bromby states.

"I just like to collect them because I'm fascinated by them. I like anything from 1920 back.

"You have to be very careful how you put them down, because the glass becomes brittle after a while."

Bromby has no plans to sell off his collection and will leave it to his wife, who has since developed an interest in bottles.

"A lot of these pieces are priceless," he revealed.

Bromby not only knows of the value of the bottles in his collection but how the bottles got to Bermuda in the first place and ended up either underwater or underground.

He points to blue bottles in a cabinet, one a bottle for poison which had ridges down two sides which the blind identified by touches. Another blue bottle was used to hold castor oil and a third was for ink for quill pens.

"It was all brought here mainly from England, Europe and the United States, they were the main contributors to bottles coming here, on the old sailing ships," said Bromby. They brought in bottles of liquid soap, kerosene, wines and poisons and the old hardware shops used to bring them in. When British Airways was on Front Street and moved out of one building, I went down there and got a couple of big bottles.

"That was years ago and those bottles went up to the museum in Dockyard. There were 2,500 bottles up there at one time."

Bromby also tells an interesting story of how a bottle came with a marble inside, which was first made by Hiriam Codd in 1860. "Hiriam Codd was the first person to make these types of bottles," he said, explaining that the marble was put in the bottle and then the neck of the bottle sealed on to secure the marble inside.

"When I was a little boy we used to break the bottles to get the marbles and play marbles with them," he remembers.

"We didn't have TVs and motorbikes. The marble was a good strong glass, a good 'shooter' and would bust up everybody else's marbles."

So how did the bottles end up being buried or on the ocean floor?

"Prior to 1926, which was the first official trash collection in Bermuda, people used to throw the bottles into the water or bury them," said Bromby.

"A lot of people used to throw their trash overboard. I remember when I was a little boy in Dockyard they used to throw truckloads of bottles overboard and they would float out to sea every night until they sank. They weren't worried about the value of them. Bottles were a necessity back then, some of the big bottles were kept and reused."

Two years ago Bromby became the first Bermudian bottle collector to become a member of the Surrey Bottle Collectors Club, the biggest such club in England.

"They send me a quarterly newsletter and it tells me more about bottles they are finding over there, so I can look at the stuff in the books and know the ages," said Bromby.

"I used to belong to the Antique Bottle Collectors Association of America, one of the first associations they had when bottle clubs were being formed."

"Not many Bermudians are collecting bottles right now, the only other person I know who does it on a big scale is Phil Pearson in Warwick. There is another guy up in Somerset who goes diving for bottles. I can't remember his name but he has a nice collection as well."