A selection of paintings, drawings & jottings

Of the one hundred and twenty men aboard only two survived.

 

This is an account the ship’s final voyage to India and back.

 

It tells of storm, pirates, accident, starvation and disaster.

 

The English East India Company (EIC for short) owned the ship, they organised the salvage of as much of her cargo as could be saved.  Other people helped themselves to what was left.  In the years that followed people dived onto the wreck site.

 

But then it was lost, marked vaguely on a few old maps.

 

In 1998 the investigations focused on a particular site at a place called ‘Loe Bar’ and a team, The President Archaeological Expedition, was assembled to take the matter further.

 

The site is now officially protected and members of the team have dived on it a number of times. Their work has been to confirm, as far as possible, the identity of the wreckage as that of the President, and to conduct a pre-disturbance survey - measuring the locations of everything visible prior to receiving permission to move or salvage anything.

 

The team's work was supervised by the Archaeological Diving Unit (ADU) of St Andrews University under their contract with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.    In 2003 that contract passed to English Heritage who in turn contracted Wessex Archaeology to oversee wreck sites and catalogue findings and material from the previous two decades.  In 2005 Wessex Archaeology visited the site to confirm the magnetometer survey of six years earlier.