On 6 June 1793, in the Bay of Biscay, she captured Vanneau, a tiny vessel with an armament of just six guns, which the Royal Navy took into service.

By 15 December, the British and Spanish withdrew, taking with them 15,000 Royalists, as well as destroying the dockyards and a large number of French warships.

Though Colossus was involved in much bitter fighting, her Scots captain, John Monkton, ordered his kilt-wearing piper to proceed to the maintop mast staysail netting and play the pipes throughout the battle, no doubt to the bemusement of the French sailors who witnessed it.

In February 1797, Colossus (now commanded by Captain George Murray) was involved in yet another large-scale clash of fleets in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent.

Despite being outnumbered, it captured four Spanish ships and crippled seven, including the largest warship afloat at that time - the Santísima Trinidad.

[5] Amidst the bad winter weather Colossus sighted the Isles of Scilly first and came to anchor in St Mary's Roads on 7 December.

On the night of 10 December an anchor cable parted and the ship ran aground on a submerged ledge of rock off Samson Island.

A naval brig, Fearless, was able to put alongside the shipwrecked vessel on 29 December and bring away a quantity of stores and the body of Admiral Molyneux Shuldam which had been transported aboard Colossus for reburial in England.

In the closing years of the 1960s, Roland Morris, a marine salver,[8] began diving on the site, searching for the antiquities that Colossus had been transporting.

As a result of this new discovery the Isles of Scilly Museum in Hugh Town was handed a vast collection of artefacts from this wreck for display.

The Colossus carving was recovered from the site in 2002 (as shown in a Time Team TV special in October 2002) and after conservation by the Mary Rose Trust, was returned to Scilly in 2010 to be placed on display in the Valhalla figurehead collection on Tresco Island.

In May 2012 CISMAS embarked on an excavation of a portion of the stern of the wreck, focusing on recording finds related to the gun deck and on initiating a long-term reburial trial.

[13] In 2018 Historic England published the investigation and conservation of artefacts from HMS Colossus, thought to be a small concentration of personal items (50 buttons, a bone brush/ shoe horn and a textile fragment) recovered under a surface recovery license by the 2014 Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Maritime Archaeological Society (CISMAS) team.