Alexander Nevsky was launched on 21 September 1861 at the Okhtinskaya shipyard in Saint Petersburg — a screw frigate of 5,100 tons, large for her class, mounting fifty-one smoothbore cannon. All fifty-one were sixty-pounders, split between long and medium classes. She was part of Russia's answer to the Royal Navy, and part of that answer, awkwardly for a Russian ship, was American. When she reached New York in 1863 as flagship of Rear Admiral Stepan Lesovsky's Atlantic Squadron, sent to show the flag at a delicate moment in Russian-American relations, the local press noticed the resemblance to home-grown work. Harper's Weekly wrote that the two largest ships in the squadron "are evidently vessels of modern build, and much about them leads the unpracticed eye to think they were built in this country," adding that "the flagship's guns are of American make, being cast in Pittsburgh." The squadron stayed seven months. At one point Alexander Nevsky's engines gave trouble on a local cruise and she had to limp back to New York for repairs.

Five years later she was coming home from Piraeus, where she had taken part in the celebrations for the marriage of King George of Greece to Grand Duchess Olga of Russia. Aboard was Alexei Alexandrovich, son of Tsar Alexander II, at sea as part of his naval education, and aboard also was the admiral responsible for that education. On the night of 25 September 1868 the frigate was under sail off the west coast of Jutland in rain. Both the admiral and the ship's captain had her position wrong. The error came from the pilot book, which recorded the drift on that coast incorrectly — a small mistake in a printed table, carried out onto a lee shore in bad weather. Alexander Nevsky struck a sandbar. To keep her from rolling over at once, the crew cut away her masts and threw some of the cannon into the sea.

The distress signal was a gun. The fishermen of the Jutland coast heard it, and the sea by then had gone calm, and they came out. Working boat by boat against a wreck full of men, they took off the entire ship's company but five. Those five had launched a lifeboat to go for help themselves and drowned in the attempt — the only deaths of the night, and the only men who died trying to solve the problem rather than waiting to be rescued from it. It is worth being plain about what the rescue was: a village of working fishermen, with nothing to gain, going out at night to a foreign warship on a bar.

The Russian navy convened a court-martial and convicted both the admiral and the captain of dereliction of duty. Then the tsar intervened and pardoned them, citing their long service to the fleet. Nobody was punished for the wreck of the Alexander Nevsky. The loss made news across Europe. The poet Pyotr Vyazemsky, who had sailed aboard her at Nice in 1865, wrote a poem for the ship. The marine painter Alexey Bogolyubov produced two canvases of her end, one by night and one by day, as though the event needed both a nightmare version and a daylight one.

Three of the drowned sailors were buried in the churchyard at Harboøre. A small stone marks the officer Odintsov and the crewmen Shilov and Polyakov, and its inscription reads: "They risked their lives to save other people. In the name of our Lord peace over them." The other two went back to Russia. The ship left more behind. One of her anchors stands outside Harboøre church and another in Thyborøn, and the wreck is the subject of a major exhibition at Kystcentret, the coastal centre in Thyborøn. It is a strange kind of inheritance for a fishing village on a sandspit — a tsar's frigate, a grand duke's favourite anecdote, and three Russian graves that the parish has looked after for more than a century and a half.