Gibson family's archival shipwreck images to go under the hammer at Sotheby's London auction on November 12, 2013

KOLKATA: An unparalleled archive of shipwreck images taken by four generations of the Gibson family of photographers over nearly 130 years will be presented for sale at Sotheby's London auction on 12th November 2013.

Comprising 1000 negatives, the archive records the wrecks of over 200 ships and the fate of their passengers, crew and cargo as they travelled from across the world through the notoriously treacherous seas around Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly between 1869 and 1997.

At the very forefront of early photojournalism, John Gibson and his descendants were determined to be first on the scene when these shipwrecks struck. Each and every wreck had its own story to tell with unfolding drama, heroics, tragedies and triumphs to be photographed and recorded.

The archive will be sold alongside the original handwritten eyewitness accounts as recorded by the Gibson family, and is estimated to achieve between £100,000 and euros 150,000.

Author John Le Carre, on visiting the Gibsons of Scilly archive in 1997, expressed: "We are standing in an Aladdin's cave where the Gibson treasure is stored. It is half shed, half amateur laboratory, a litter of cluttered shelves, ancient equipment, boxes, printer's blocks and books. Many hundreds of plates and thousands of photographs are still waiting an inventory. Most have never seen the light of day. Any agent, publisher or accountant would go into free fall at the very sight of them."