In a case of life imitating art, divers have rediscovered a 17th century shipwreck off the coast of Gunwalloe in exactly the same spot where a shipwreck scene was filmed for the TV series Poldark.

First discovered by a local diver in 1971, the wreck of the Schiedam had been buried for many years under the shifting sands of Church Cove.

The site is now managed by Historic England and dived by local team, two of which have now found that the site is once again uncovered.

Novelist and archaeologist David Gibbins and Mark Milburn, of Atlantic Scuba in Penryn, had searched the cove many times looking for the wreck, but had seen only sand.

They said: "The breakthrough came one day after a storm. Snorkelling north over the cove, we saw not just one cannon, but three. It was incredibly exciting.

"One of the guns was among the longest we’d ever seen on a wreck, standing proud of the seabed on a rocky ledge with the muzzle poking out, almost as if it were on a gun carriage.

"Exploring the reefs around the guns, we saw other amazing artefacts – concreted musket barrels, cannon balls, lead musket and pistol shot, and even an iron hand-grenade, the wooden plug for the fuse still intact. We knew that most of what we were seeing was cargo carried from the English colony at Tangier, making the wreck a fascinating window into a forgotten corner of history."

At the time the Schiedam was lost, in April 1684, she was part of a fleet carrying ordnance, tools, horses and people back from Tangier, the port in present-day Morocco that had been acquired by the English King Charles II as a dowry with his Portuguese wife, but had been abandoned by the English in the face of Moorish threat. The Schiedam herself was originally Dutch, a merchantman sailing from Holland, but had been captured by Barbary pirates off Spain in 1683 and her crew enslaved.

Soon afterwards she was captured again, this time by a Royal Navy ship commanded by a daring young captain named Cloudesley Shovell – later as an admiral to be lost with his fleet in 1707, in the Isles of Scilly Isles, through a navigational error.

None other than the diarist Samuel Pepys, then an Admiralty official, was sent to Tangier to help oversee the evacuation.

Further exploration of the Schiedam is planned for next year.