Its sinking in 1744, which claimed the lives of 1,100 sailors, is considered the worst single British naval disaster in the English Channel. Encountering human remains is 'a daily part of archaeology', the foundation under the group says, and can be dealt with sensitively. 1765: HMS Victory is launched.

When a skull was found on the Victory wreck, work immediately stopped and the MoD was informed, it says.Despite Victory's unique history and concerns over fishing, looting and erosion, in September the wreck site was declared "environmentally stable" and ordered to be "left in situ", according to the MoD and the Department for Digital, Culture Media & Sport.In addition, Unesco rules do not allow for items to be removed from the wreck, the government departments said in a document lodged with the foundation's licence application.This decade-long saga faces a further twist though, as the foundation has now been granted permission to launch a judicial review of the government's decision not to allow preliminary archaeological work on the wreck.The launch of legal proceedings at the Royal Courts of Justice on 6 February has been acknowledged by the MoD, which said it was inappropriate to comment further on the case as it was "subject to ongoing litigation".For Dr Kingsley the current impasse means "nobody wins".

Artefacts from the shipwreck of HMS Victory, which sank in 1744, can be recovered to save them from damage. Artist John Batchelor's depiction of HMS Victory

After analysing evidence at a High Court hearing in London, a judge dismissed the foundation's challenge.

Since then, there has been serious debate over whether the wreck should be excavated with artifacts kept in a museum, or if it should be allowed to rest undisturbed underwater'It was the wreck that every wreck-finder wanted to find,' said diver Richard Keen who began searching in 1973 for Victory the predecessor of Admiral Lord Nelson's more famous namesake ship.The professional diver from Guernsey grouped together with five others to scour the seabed for two months near Les Casquets, a group of islands eight miles west of Alderney the northernmost Channel Island.The group did manage to locate the wreck of passenger steamer Stella, which sank in 1899 claiming 105 lives but HMS Victory remained elusive.Search efforts initially focused on the infamous Casquets - where the ship was thought to have been wrecked due to the poor navigation of Balchin.But in 2009, Odyssey Marine Exploration announced it had discovered Victory, 62 mile away from those rocks.This suggested that a fierce storm rather than a navigational error had been behind the sinking.As with the Mary Rose, the Tudor warship which was raised in 1982, there was great public interest in the find.Built during a period of British naval ascendancy, Victory, and its more famous successor, were two of the most expensive and grandest ships of the period. One man who is convinced Victory's artefacts are best taken out of "harm's way" is Dr Sean Kingsley, a marine archaeologist for the Maritime Heritage Foundation (MHF), which was gifted the wreck site in 2012.He would like to see artefacts brought up and displayed in a UK museum. This Victory cannon has a thick layer of sand and shell concretion on it The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. For the museum ship at Portsmouth on which Admiral Nelson was killed during the Battle of Trafalgar, see HMS Victory. The wreck contains at least 41 bronze cannons