The 104-gun ship participated in many important military conflicts, the most significant being the Battle of Trafalgar on 21st October 1805.
Captained by Lord Nelson, HMS Victory led the British fleet when they defeated the combined naval powers of France and Spain, thwarting the French leader Napoleon Bonaparte's attempt to invade Britain.
Sadly, the heroic English admiral lost his life defending his country, at the age of only 47. He was fatally wounded by a musket ball that passed through his lung and spine on 21st October 1805. His body was brought home for a state funeral in England.
Construction of Nelson's HMS Victory began in July 1758 at Chatham Dockyard. The mighty ship was first commissioned for active service in March 1778. Today, she is a permanent fixture and tourist attraction in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard.
HMS Victory's predecessor
Many people may not realise that Nelson's iconic flagship wasn't the first famous vessel in history to have the name HMS Victory. Back in September 1733, construction of her predecessor, a 100-gun first rate ship of the Royal Navy, was completed at Portsmouth Dockyard.
While Nelson's warship survived many battles and arrived home after defeating the French and Spanish naval fleets, the earlier HMS Victory and her crew suffered a different and extremely tragic fate. The worst single British disaster in naval history occurred in the English Channel on 5th October 1744, when she sank without a trace, causing the deaths of 1,100 crew members.
The final British ship to be armed solely with bronze cannons, HMS Victory was a high-sided ship and therefore hard to steer. In recent years, historians have said this probably contributed to her loss during a severe storm.
She was the flagship of Admiral Sir John Balchen, a highly experienced and distinguished officer of the Royal Navy, whose career at sea had begun in the late 17th century, when he took a naval commission at the age of 15.
The navy was his life and he had participated in numerous battles against the Spanish and French fleets for more than 60 years. His career had spanned three separate wars and he had been highly commended for the defence of his ships against all the odds.
Balchen was 74 years old when he made his fateful final voyage in 1744, leading a naval force which successfully freed a British convoy trapped on the river Tagus, in Portugal, by a French blockade.
Tragic accident
A combined Dutch and British fleet led by Balchen drove away the French, who surrendered in the face of the superior military power. The victorious convoy of 25 ships set off on their return journey to Britain.
Tragically, a violent storm blew up as they sailed through the Western Approaches of the English Channel in early October. The ships in the convoy were scattered across the Channel, but most of them limped safely home, damaged and leaking water, over the next few days.
The only one not to return to England was Balchen's HMS Victory. Ironically, she was one of the largest and newest ships in the world. Multiple frigates were sent across the English Channel to search for HMS Victory, but she had disappeared without trace.
Balchen and his 1,100-strong crew went down with the ship and a period of national mourning began in Britain. Later, wreckage including part of the ship's top mast washed up on Guernsey's shores in the Channel Islands. More wreckage was then washed up on Alderney and Jersey.
Local residents said they had heard distress guns on the night of 5th October 1744, at the height of the storm. However, they were unable to send out rescue vessels due to the severe weather conditions. No crew members' bodies were ever found and the whereabouts of HMS Victory remained a mystery for more than 250 years, despite many search efforts.
Discovering HMS Victory
In February 2009, the Odyssey Marine Exploration, based in Florida, made the announcement everyone had been waiting for. Divers had found HMS Victory, 265 years after she had sunk, on the ocean bed 62 miles from the infamous rocks at the Casquets, off the Alderney coast.
This suggested the fierce storm had blown her severely off course, with the reported high sides of the ship being a factor in the crew's inability to steer in gale force winds. It also dispelled the myth that a navigational error had caused her to sink.
There was massive public interest in the find, especially because the Victory was one of the grandest and most expensive ships of the 18th century. She had been built in an era when the Royal Navy was central to British power and prosperity.
When the OME team made their discovery, they realised transporting the Victory's treasures to the surface from a depth of around 240 feet would be expensive and complex due to the marine equipment required for the operation. Any divers attempting to salvage the artefacts from the ocean bed would need watertight storage boxes to protect the fragile items from damage. They would also have to protect expensive electrical items such as cameras, audio visual equipment and other electronics required during the salvage operation.
The 100,000 gold coins reportedly being carried on the ship have never been found, although cannons and other artefacts have been recovered. Two of Victory's bronze guns, one weighing 42 lbs and the other 12 lbs, are now at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth. The government gave its permission for them to be brought up from the deep.
It was the larger gun that helped maritime archaeologists establish this was the wreck of HMS Victory. Naval ships after the Victory had guns made of iron.
As well as the cannons, other artefacts including glass bottle fragments, rigging, anchors and the remains of the hull were found. The ship was covered in a thick layer of sand and shells that were concreted onto it after being underwater for more than 250 years. The artefacts are of great historical significance, but they are not of any monetary value commercially, due to legislation governing sovereign naval property.
The Victory was "the wreck that every wreck-finder wanted to find", according to Richard Keen, a professional diver from Guernsey, who had been searching for her in the 1970s with a group of five other divers around Les Casquets.
How much of the wreck is still below the surface?
Today, most of the wreck of HMS Victory is still lying below the surface - leading some experts to call it the "abandoned shipwreck". Arguments have been going back and forth over whether the site should continue to be surveyed underwater, or whether the ship should rise again.
Odyssey gifted the wreck site to the Maritime Heritage Foundation in 2012. The MHF's marine archaeologist Dr Sean Kingley said he thought more artefacts should be brought to the surface and put on display in a UK museum.
The government has been criticised for leaving the unique wreck offshore in one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world. In 2014, the Ministry of Defence conceded the wreck could be at risk from further erosion, illegal salvage and damage from fishing trawlers.
In 2018, the "research and rescue" application was put on hold. A High Court ruling in September 2019 supported the MoD's bid to leave the artefacts on the wreck and the site was declared "environmentally stable".
Everyone agrees on the historical importance of the find, but some object to moving it on moral grounds. The Joint Nautical Archaeology Policy Committee has argued the wreck should be treated as a grave and not disturbed, as it's the final resting place of 1,100 British sailors.
In September 2020, naval officer Dominic Robinson completed a dive to the wreck and shared the images online in June 2021. Robinson and two fellow divers from the Joint Service Sub Aqua Centre, at the Royal Navy's Devonport base, spent three hours in the water to capture eerie images of HMS Victory's cannons engraved with ornate royal crests. They are now home to fish and other marine life.
There were also poignant reminders that the sunken vessel was once home to 1,100 men when the divers found a massive copper kettle, an alcohol bottle and galley bricks that formed part of the stove.