Kelly Prime

That's Scilly spelled S-C-I-L-L-Y, not silly ha-ha.

In fact, silly is not haha at all.

It's a place that's hard to wrap your mind around.

The islands sit in the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, so you'll find tropical plants like giant palms and birds of paradise all blooming up against the backdrop of the rugged North Atlantic.

These islands are plopped down in churning waters with jagged rocks rising all around like the jaws of some sort of mythical sea creature.

In this past October, I found myself on a little boat called the Buccaneer right in the middle of it.

The buccaneer belongs to a scuba diver named Todd Stevens.

Todd has been diving the shipwrecks around Sili for over two decades.

Are there shipwrecks below us right now?

Are there life jackets on this boat?

We were specifically looking for the remains of one particular disaster, where not one but four ships were lost on the same night.

The HMS Association, Romney, Eagle, and Firebrand.

Shovel and his fleet had just fought a battle with the French.

They were headed back, and according to their maps, they were about to pass safely into the English Channel.

But in reality, they were actually 200 miles off course, exactly where you really do not want to be, smack in the middle of the Isles of Scilly.

But the important thing about this shipwreck, why it's still remembered today, isn't just the scale of the disaster.

It's also why it happened and how it could have been avoided.

Because the navigators of the fleet were missing a vital piece of information.

And do we know why they thought they were that far?

And this wasn't because they lost their map or their navigator was killed by pirates or they were just really bad at their jobs.