内容摘要：There are also some age restrictions on who can enter the front standing section.

There are also some age restrictions on who can enter the front standing section.

"They used mattresses to plug the gap which had opened up in the hull of the SS Nantes," he said."[The ship sank] with the loss of a substantial number of the crew. There were some 23-odd fatalities. There were three survivors."

Bodies from the wreckage washed ashore at Talland Bay and Looe, in Cornwall, and "locals were confronted by this picture of horror, pieces of ship together with bodies," he said.Afterwards the "wreck was essentially lost, obviously you're dealing in a period with no satellite navigation," said Dr Bennett.He added while the crew tried to save the ship it "drifted for several hours, before it finally made its way to the bottom, sadly, with many of its crewmen on board".

He said the wreck was lost until a local dive team identified it in 2024.Mr Robinson, who has been diving for about 35 years, said he heard about the unidentified wreck from the UK Hydrographic Office.

said the wreck "was clearly an early steamship when we got down there" but "at the end of my dive I found a broken piece of plate... I decided to bring it up to the surface [and] we found that had the Cunard Steamship crest on it".

"It was then bingo, we've found it," he said.It made its way around the world and returned to the UK but was unknown as a Turner masterpiece for more than a century. His signature was revealed after the painting was cleaned last year.

The artwork will be displayed in a public exhibition at Sotheby's, in London, between 28 June and 1 July before it is auctioned with an estimated value of up to £300,000.Julian Gascoigne, Sotheby's senior specialist, said: "It's a fascinating and very instructive insight into his early style."

He added the painting represents Turner, famed as a watercolourist, as a teenage artist with "ambition and skill" in his early experiments an oil painter.The painting made its debut at the Royal Academy in 1793, three days after Turner's 18th birthday, before being bought by Reverend Robert Nixon, a customer of his father's barber shop.