Qualla: HMS Colossus (1787)

HMS Colossus (1787): Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit John Rostron, CC BY-SA 2.0. HMS Colossus was a 74-gun Royal Navy ship of the line, built at Gravesend in Kent and launched in 1787. She fought at the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1797 under Admiral Sir John Jervis. A year later, in December 1798, she was anchored off the Isles of Scilly carrying Sir William Hamilton's collection of Greek vases home from Naples when she dragged her anchor in a gale and was driven onto the rocks off the island of Samson. She broke up over the following weeks. No further salvage proved possible and the vessel sank entirely in early January 1799. Hamilton's antiquities - some of the finest classical Greek pottery ever assembled by a private collector - went down with her. The wreck was rediscovered in 1974, and the British Museum is still slowly reassembling what the divers find.

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Image: John Rostron | CC BY-SA 2.0

HMS Colossus (1787): Roland Morris and the Antiquities

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 4.0. Roland Morris was a Cornish diver and marine salvor who became fascinated by the lost cargo of HMS Colossus in the late 1960s. He knew the wreck must lie somewhere in the shallow water around Samson, and he knew that what she had been carrying was extraordinary: thousands of frag...

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Image: andrewrabbott | CC BY-SA 4.0

HMS Colossus (1787): The Stern, Found Twice

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Knights, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 2000, a Scilly diver named Todd Stevens reported new wreckage to the Receiver of Wreck - the office that handles shipwreck recoveries under English law. The remains turned out to be the stern of the ship, which had separated from the main wreck at some point and lay some dista...

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Image: Richard Knights | CC BY-SA 2.0

HMS Colossus (1787): The Carving Returns to Tresco

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 4.0. The stern carving was carefully recovered from the seabed in 2002, in a project filmed for a special episode of the Time Team archaeology series broadcast in October that year. The Mary Rose Trust - the conservation team that had spent decades stabilising the Tudor warship Mary R...

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Image: andrewrabbott | CC BY-SA 4.0

HMS Colossus (1787): Ongoing Excavation

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit andrewrabbott, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Maritime Archaeology Society - CISMAS - has been inspecting and recording the wreck site routinely since 2001. Their work is funded and endorsed by Historic England. In May 2012 CISMAS launched a focused excavation of part of the stern, focusing o...

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Image: andrewrabbott | CC BY-SA 4.0