Thankfully the ship rests within the shallows. He has not used this equipment earlier than and won’t enterprise any deeper than he should. Twenty toes under the floor. No hazard there, he tells himself. And he is aware of precisely the place to look. Under cautious instruction the item he seeks was safely hidden throughout the starboard bow, away from the opposite shipments tightly packed within the maintain, however the ship broke aside within the storm; he hopes his luck stays true, that the crate has not strayed too far alongside the seabed, that nobody else has managed to retrieve it …
William Hamilton liked his Greek vases, having collected lots of them throughout his 35 years residing in Naples. During his time serving as British Ambassador to King Ferdinand between 1764-1799, his official duties allowed his mental passions for artwork and tradition to blossom. In specific he ardently pursued his curiosity in antiquities, buying Greek vases from collectors, funding archaeological digs and opening historical tombs. This curiosity quickly turned an obsession – by 1766 he had amassed a set of over 200 particular person items. For his personal scholarly satisfaction (it may be presumed), in 1766–67 he revealed a four-volume set of engravings of his assortment entitled Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman antiquities from the cupboard of the Honble. Wm. Hamilton, His Britannick Maiesty’s envoy extraordinary on the Court of Naples:
He was, understandably, devastated. In a letter he wrote to his nephew Charles Greville in 1799, he stated of his vases
“they had better be in Paris than at the bottom of the sea; have you no good news of them? they were excellently packed up, & the cases will not easily go to pieces, & the sea water will not hurt the vases. All the cream of my collection were in those eight cases on board the Colossus, & I can’t bear to look at some remaining cases here in which I know there are only black vases without figures.”
~~~~~~
My debut novel Pandora opens with the restoration of an historical vase from the shipwreck of HMS Colossus, and options William Hamilton fairly prominently as a key character. To learn all about it you’ll be able to order by clicking the picture under:
Twitter & Instagram: @SStokesChapman
