IT safely crossed thousands of miles of open sea and carried a celebrity passenger around the treacherous waters of Cape Horn, only to be smashed to pieces a few miles from home.
Two hundred years after the Nancy was lost with all lives, the wreck has been discovered off the coast of Cornwall by two divers who believe it to contain a treasure worth millions.
Yesterday, Todd Stevens, 46, and Ed Cumming, 62, announced th
at after a ten-year search, they had located the vessel, a ten-gun ship which sank during a storm in February 1784. The pair have now "adopted'' the wreck through the Nautical Archaeology Society and any treasure recovered will have to be logged and reported to the Receiver of Wreck at the Maritime and Coastguard Agency.
Mr Cumming, 62, said: "This has always been one of the most intriguing wrecks to go after. It has everything – a beautiful actress, a tragic shipwreck and a lost fortune. We are still trying to piece together the human stories around the wreck but we are sure we have found her. We have found the anchor, one of the guns and some bits and pieces. The weather has been awful so diving's extremely difficult.''
The Nancy's most famous passenger was Ann Cargill, the "Angelina Jolie" of 18th-century England, who was sailing back from Bombay with her illegitimate child, and a fortune rumoured to be as much as £200,000 – an incredible £200 million in today's value.
The diva, who had astounded audiences in London and Liverpool, and lived for a spell in Edinburgh, had fled to India in 1783 with a new lover, who worked for the East India Company.
But tragically, as she returned home the following year, the vessel smashed on to rocks off the Isles of Scilly. Ann Cargill, clutching her baby, leapt into a small lifeboat, along with other passengers but the small boat later sank, killing all onboard.
For decades, local divers have searched the seabed for the wreck. Official papers referred to the passengers being "driven'' into the small Rosevear Island. But the divers realised descriptions of a boat being driven referred to the lifeboat – and not the Nancy itself.
Mr Cumming explained: ''We realised that after the ship had hit the rocks, the passengers had got into a smaller boat and that was the one that had been driven on to Rosevear.
"So people were looking in the wrong place for the Nancy; they should have been looking further out.''
The first thing islanders knew about the sinking was when paperwork began washing ashore. Bodies were found including a woman clutching her dead baby – but rescuers were unaware this was Ann Cargill.
She had previously caused outrage aged 15 by running off with the playwright Miles Peter Andrews then went on to become the world's highest-paid actress but was later deported from India on the orders of William Pitt the Younger.
He told parliament "an actress should not be defiling the pure shores of India'' and she boarded the Nancy to return in disgrace. After the sinking, she was buried in a pauper's grave but when it was realised who she was, her body was exhumed and reburied in the Scilly capital, St Mary's.
Official logs in India showed she had been carrying all of her possessions including jewels and gifts from her various lovers and a £200,000 fortune.
Accounts of her death in the press described her as "floating in her shift'' with an infant at her bosom. Local legend has it that her lonely spirit, singing a lullaby to her lost child, still haunts the island where she died.
Watery graves to fascinate landlubbers• THE Mary Rose was an English Tudor warship and one of the first to be able to fire a full broadside of cannons. Built in Portsmouth in 1509-10, she was at first equipped with 78 guns, and later upgraded in 1536 to 91.
She sank during an engagement with the French fleet on 19 July, 1545. The surviving section of the ship was raised in 1982 and is now on display in Portsmouth.
• The RMS Titanic was an Olympic-class passenger liner, then the largest in the world, owned by the White Star Line and built at the Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast. On the night of 14 April, 1912, during her maiden voyage, Titanic hit an iceberg and sank, resulting in the deaths of 1,517 people. In 1985, the wreck was discovered by a team led by Dr Robert Ballard, who used miniature subs to find the vessel at a depth of two and a half miles.
• The Whydah was the flagship of pirate captain Black Sam, wrecked in a storm off Cape Cod in 1717. When it was discovered in 1984 by Barry Clifford, it was the only confirmed find of a pirate ship in modern times. Between 1993-1996, Clifford also directed underwater surveys to try to find The Blessing of Burnt Island that sank in 1633 with the royal silver of King Charles I in the Firth of Forth.
