Back in 1659, a Virginia Company ship, The Eagle, was transporting immigrants from England to Jamestown, Virginia, when it wrecked on one of Bermuda’s treacherous reefs. The passengers made it to shore, leaving behind the remnants of their ship to rot on the ocean floor.

Fast forward 300 years, when a yacht called Elda wrecked on the very same reef during the Newport-to-Bermuda race. A diver trying to salvage the yacht looked down and noticed what turned out to be The Eagle’s cannons on the sea bottom.

When wreck diving enthusiast, William Gillies, heard about the newly discovered wreck he decided to take a look. He was excited to find a rare shaft and globe bottle near The Eagle wreck site. Unfortunately, as soon as he picked it up, part of it crumbled. Many similar shaft and globe bottles from The Eagle also crumbled.

Most people would have been terribly disappointed, but Mr Gillies was undeterred. He took what was left of bottle home and repaired it using a resin and fibreglass process. Today, it sits in his cabinet along with many other finds and restored shipwreck items. Some of his restoration work can be seen at the BUEI and at the Bermuda National Museum in Dockyard.

Mr Gillies, author of Reefs, Wrecks and Relics: Bermuda’s Underwater Heritage, will be giving a lecture tomorrow evening about his 40 years as a shipwreck diver and enthusiast.

“I am good at putting together all kinds of objects,” said Mr Gillies, “but I like glass better than anything else.”

Reconnecting a pile of broken glass might sound like a frustrating enterprise, but Mr Gillies said it’s not so for him.

“I enjoy it,” he said. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it. I don’t do it for money; I have never charged anything.”

He is completely self taught.

“The glass from The Eagle was the worst glass I have ever seen,” he recalled. “At first I thought it was the environment that had caused it to deteriorate, but I eventually decided it was the composition of the glass when it was made.”

He keeps a glass cabinet full of some of his more interesting finds and repairs. The cabinet contains cannon balls, glass bottles and jars and two ancient pistols, among other things. He said one of the pistols was particularly difficult to restore.

“The pistol I found is a composite artefact made from three different substances, iron, brass and wood,” said Mr Gillies. “The treatment for each one was not compatible with the other, so it was tricky. It was made in the 1730s. When something goes in to the sea it gets encrusted with coralline algae. It builds up a crust. When I found it, the whole thing was encrusted.”

When he removed the encrustation, he found that it had formed a mold of the original barrel. He used that to cast a new one.

After going through heart surgery a few years ago, he had to give up diving.

“It was getting harder and harder, so I was disappointed to stop,” he said.

Some of his last finds included two historic bottles that were uncovered by Hurricane Fabian in September 2003.

“These two bottles were laying on the bottom out in the open,” he said. “They were about seven miles out to the southwest of Bermuda. We had been over that area so many times and never found anything.”

He originally started diving because he was interested in corals. Ironically, he said he didn’t even like boats very much and got a little queasy the first times he went out with friends.

“I eventually got used to it,” he said. “I would go out with Teddy Tucker. He and his friends would put out a line behind the boat and tow someone. As they were towed they would look at the sea bottom on the look out for signs of wrecks.”

Mr Gillies used to volunteer for this position because he got less sea sick that way, and it was a chance to look at the reefs and the fish.

“First of all I used to see nothing in terms of wrecks,” he said. “The other guys had more experience than me and would be jumping off the boat and hollering ‘there’s a wreck here’. I asked them to show me what they saw. A wreck isn’t a wreck with a skeleton at the wheel like you see in the cartoons. It is usually ballast — big rocks that don’t belong on the bottom. There might be odd bits of timber and maybe some metal stuck to the reef.”

Eventually, he went out enough that he became adept at spotting wreck sites.

“When you spot a wreck you go down and have a look,” he said. “Instead of going straight to the main part, I would circle around the perimeter. That is where bottles and things come out as the ship breaks up. You find things, away from the site, very often and they are very often intact.”

Mr Gillies’ lecture entitled Reefs, Wrecks and Relics will be at the BUEI tomorrow at 7.30pm. Tickets are $20 for members of the BUEI and $25 for non-members. Tickets are available by calling 294-0204 or visiting BUEI’s Oceans Gift Shop. Ticket holders are entitled to 20 percent off dinner at the Harbourfront Restaurant before or after the lecture. Call 295-4207 for reservations and be sure to mention the lecture.