Divers discover legendary Scillies shipwreck

The

Nancy a ten gun ship that was carrying Ann Cargill and her love child home to London after the beautiful opera singer had been expelled from India, sank without trace on rocks off the Isles of Scilly in a storm in 1784.

The

sad singer had been haunted by notoriety (as were many stage stars of that era) and had caused outrage at the age of only 15 by running off with the playwright Miles Peter Andrews while starring in a London production of

The

Fairy Prince. She eventually travelled to India, took yet another lover and performed to packed audiences, often gaining a share of the profits on top of her fee, until ejected from India on the orders of Prime Minister William Pitt

The

Younger who told Parliament, ‘An actress should not be defiling the pure shores of India.’

She took passage aboard the ill fated Nancy, along with her baby and a legendary fortune, estimated to be a then staggering £200,000. Accounts of Cargill’s tragic death and her body being found ‘floating in her shift’ with an infant at her bosom were published in English newspapers, and local legend has it that her lonely spirit still haunts the island spot where she died, singing a ghostly lullaby to her lost child.

The

re has been no sign of the lost ship or Ann Cargill’s fortune until divers Todd Stevens and Ed Cummings revealed last week that they had discovered the wreck of the Nancy, which had apparently foundered because there was no lighthouse to guide it. Bishops Rock had not yet been built and the ship would have been unable see the lighthouse at St Agnes.

The

delay in locating the Nancy may have been due to official papers referring to the passengers being driven into a small island. Cummings and Stevens realised the descriptions referred to a lifeboat and not the Nancy itself. ‘People were looking in the wrong place for the Nancy, they should have been looking further out,’ said Ed Cummings.

Todd Stevens added, ‘It has been a real thrill. This kind of discovery is what you go diving for. We are still searching for the gold and jewels but if we find them we will hand them all over to the Isles of Scilly Museum.’

The

wreck was found last year but the two men have only just revealed their discovery because they were keen that the site should not be disturbed.

The

pair have now written a book called the

Ghosts Of Rosevear.