The wreckage of a First World War minesweeper has been discovered off the Portuguese coast.
The Roberto Ivens was hit by a mine laid by a German submarine. Captain Raul Alexandre Cascais and 15 crew died in the action, with seven survivors.
Nearly 100 years later the wreckage has been spotted on the ocean floor about 8 kilometres off the coast to the west of Cascais.
The loss of the Roberto Ivens marked the first sinking of a Portuguese ship in the First World War, which the country officially joined on March 9, 1916, when Germany declared war on Portugal.
Historians and documentation suggested that the minesweeper had sunk much further out to sea but the discovery by Navy surveyors has led to calls for further investigation to see if the ship has any sensible chance of being raised.
The discovery comes after a search was launched by Paulo Costa and his team at the Institute of Contemporary History with the support of the Cultural Commission of the Navy and the Hydrographic Institute. This is all in preparation for a programme of activities to mark 100 years since Portugal entered the Great War.
The Navy now will use a Remotely Operated Vehicle to ascertain the state of the wreck, and a decision can be taken by the government as to the future of the ship which should be categorised as a war grave.
Roberto 'The Devil' Ivens, after whom the minesweeper was named, was born in the Azores in 1850 of an Azorean mother, Margarida Júlia de Medeiros Castelo Branco, and an English father, Robert Breakspeare Ivens.
Roberto died in 1898 after a rip-roaring career as an officer in the Portuguese Navy, as a colonial administrator and after a period as an explorer in Portuguese Africa.
For his service to Portugal, Roberto was appointed aide-de-camp to King Luís. In 1895, he was made Officer of the Military Order of Aviz and was nominated as secretary of the Commission of Cartography.
