Atalanta was serving as a training ship when in 1880 she disappeared with her entire crew after setting sail from the Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda for Falmouth, England on 31 January 1880.

The search for evidence of her fate attracted worldwide attention, and the Admiralty received more than 150 telegrams and 200 personal calls from anxious friends and relatives after it was announced that the ship was missing, and possibly lost.

The young sailors were either too timid to go aloft or were incapacitated by sea sickness... Varling states that they hid themselves away, and could not be found when wanted by the boatswain's mate.

"[2] The exact circumstances of the ship's loss remain uncertain, but the gunboat Avon – which arrived at Portsmouth on 19 April from the Chile station – reported "that at the Azores she noticed immense quantities of wreckage floating about... in fact the sea was strewn with spars etc.

[7] Since the 1960s, the loss of HMS Atalanta has often been cited as evidence of the purported Bermuda Triangle, an allegation shown to be nonsense by the research of author David Francis Raine in 1997.