She originally saw service on the North American and West Indies station between 1843 and 1846 under the command of her first captain, George Augustus Elliot (the eldest son of her designer).

[6] The design features an imp grasping Eurydice’s dress, pulling her back down into the underworld, whilst the snake that fatally bit her in the Greek tragedy makes its escape.

[7] After being recommissioned under the command of Captain Marcus Augustus Stanley Hare, Eurydice sailed from Portsmouth on a three-month tour of the North America and West Indies Station, which had its headquarters at Bermuda, on 13 November 1877.

After a very fast passage across the Atlantic,[8] on 24 March 1878,[9] Eurydice was caught in a heavy snow storm off the Dunnose headland[10] at the Isle of Wight, capsized and sank in Sandown Bay.

[11] A weather report in The Midland Naturalist explained:[12] The violent but brief atmospheric disturbance which was the cause of this catastrophe appears to have advanced from the N.W., and reached the north of England about ten a.m.

Two of her crew, David Bennett and Alfred Barnes, are buried in Rottingdean St Margaret's churchyard when bodies were washed ashore nearby.

Juno was renamed HMS Atalanta and made two successful voyages between England and the West Indies before also disappearing at sea on her crossing the North Atlantic from Bermuda in 1880 with the loss of 281 lives; the ship is believed to have been lost in a storm.

The phantom Eurydice has been sighted frequently by sailors over the years since her sinking, and she is said to haunt Dunnose, a cape on the Isle of Wight that lies west of Shanklin, close to the village of Luccombe at the southwesterly end of Sandown Bay.