23 minute read
Nantucket's Portuguese’s Heritage
NANTUCKET’S
PORTUGUESE HERITAGE
By Frances Karttunen
Beginning in 1854, Nantucket’s Old Mill was owned by a series of former mariners from the Azores. John Francis Sylvia, seen here with his wife Angelica in 1883, owned the mill from 1866 until his death in 1896. GPN55.
Today a vibrant Brazilian community makes its home on Nantucket, but the historic roots of Portuguese culture on the island—the source of our staples of Portuguese bread, linguiça, and kale— can be traced to two groups of Portuguese Atlantic islands: the Azores and the islands of the Cape Verde Archipelago. These island groups, both regularly visited in the nineteenth century by Nantucket whaling vessels, are distant from each other geographically, with different populations and histories. Had any whaling captain confused them, he would never have returned home. Since the end of Nantucket’s whaling era, however, the two island groups have been chronically confused, conflated, and misidentified.
In 1899, The Inquirer and Mirror’s obituary of Captain John Murray—a whaleman from the Azorean island of Graciosa whose original surname was Mendonça—stated that he “was a native of the Cape de Verde Islands.” The following week the newspaper had to print a correction regretting “that an error on our part as to the place of his nativity should have caused his friends annoyance.”1 Annie Gebo—mother of six, grandmother of fourteen, great-grandmother of fifteen, and eventually a centenarian—was featured in The Inquirer and Mirror as she approached her ninety-sixth birthday and again three years later as she turned ninety-nine. In 1967, the newspaper reported that “Mrs. Gebo was born in the Cape Verde Islands, Azores, on January 20, 1871, and came to
1 Inquirer and Mirror, Apr. 8, 1899, 1, and Apr. 15, 1899, 4. Such radical name changes were not uncommon. John V. Smith, a stalwart of the Azorean community on Nantucket, changed his name from João Vargas Correia when he relocated to the U.S. in the 1850s; Inquirer and Mirror, Sept. 21, 1899, 1. Marianna A. (Lewis) Murray (b. 1865), also called Mary, photographed in 1891. Born on Nantucket, she was the daughter of George W. and Margaret Lewis, immigrants from Graciosa in the Azores. She married Philip Murray (original surname Soza, b. 1865), an Azorean immigrant also from Graciosa, in February 1889. They had six children together. He was a laborer at the time of their marriage but by the 1920s was proprietor of a livery stable on island. GPN3231.
this country in 1891, when she was 20. She took up her residence here in 1911, which means she has been living here for fifty-six years.” Three years later, the error appeared uncorrected: “She was born in the Cape Verde Islands, Azores, and has lived in Nantucket since 1911.”2
Men from both island groups began to appear on Nantucket around 1800, having made their way to the east coast of New England aboard whaleships. In the early days of Atlantic whaling, vessels from Nantucket would sail east to the Azores, which were confusingly known as the Western Islands because of their location far out in the open ocean west of mainland Portugal. There
Mary Viera-Nichols and Joseph Roderick and their children Joseph Jr., Severino, James, and Alyce in the 1920s. Joseph Sr. and his brother John were born on Brava in Cape Verde. By 1918, Joseph was working as a mason on Nantucket. In 1947, he was one of the directors of the Cape Verdean American Citizenship Club of Nantucket. SC139.
they would take on fresh water, supplies, and sometimes additional crewmen before dropping down the coast of Africa to the Cape Verde islands, where they might take on more crewmen before heading back across the Atlantic to the Brazil whaling grounds and eventually northward via the Caribbean and the east coast of North America to the whaling ports of New England, Nantucket included. When New England whaling expanded into the Pacific, the men from the Azores and the Cape Verde islands might spend years aboard ship before reaching the vessel’s homeport. Having finally set foot on land once again, rather than committing to returning home aboard another whaling vessel, some men stayed, married, and established American families.
The early U.S. federal censuses did not record specific islands of origin when enumerating immigrants from these island group. Instead, an Azorean might be identified as “Portuguese” or from the Western Islands. Only in 1850 do the names of islands such as Fayal, Pico, Flores, and so forth appear in the census. For Cape Verdeans resident on Nantucket, the 1850 census simply states Cape Verde. To learn more, one must turn to other sources, such as vital records, court documents, and newspaper reports.3 The Portuguese roots of the Swazey family on Nantucket go far back to mainland Portugal rather than to the Azores. In 1770, Anthony Swazey (probably Soares originally), a young man still in his late teens, married a woman named Jerusha on Martha’s Vineyard. After the birth of two children, the couple moved from Edgartown to Nantucket. Ten more children were born to them on Nantucket, initiating a multigenerational Swazey family. Nonetheless, Anthony Swazey himself outlived any close family members who might care for
3 For example, Peter Antone’s grave stone in Nantucket’s Historic Coloured Cemetery provides no dates but does state that he was “Born at St. Anthony, C.V.” him in his last years, and he died at age 85 in Nantucket’s Quaise Farm Asylum.4 Michael Douglass (possibly da Luz or Degrasse), “a Cape di Verde Portuguese negro,” was born around 1766 and was on Nantucket by 1809. In 1811, he married the widow Mary Boston. Born in 1768, Mary was both first cousin and widowed sister-in-law of Black whaling captain and businessman Absalom Boston. The marriage of Mary and Michael came late in life, and they had no children together. Mary died in 1834, and Michael followed her in death in 1836, having drowned in a pond at age 70.5
These two couples, the Swazeys and the Douglasses, epitomize the early documented Portuguese presence on Nantucket, single men who had found non-Portuguese wives—for Anthony Swazey a wife from Martha’s Vineyard and for Michael Douglass a member of a Black family in Nantucket’s New Guinea neighborhood. The white/non-white distinction in the records just quoted reflects the history of the Azores and the Cape Verde islands. Both remote Atlantic Ocean island groups were uninhabited when discovered by Portuguese explorers
4 Vital Records of Nantucket to the Year 1850 (Boston: New England Historic
Genealogical Society, 1925), 4:58, 273, 506, 559; Vital Records of Nantucket 5:258.
5 Vital Records of Nantucket 3:388; Vital Records of Nantucket 5:231.
in the mid 1400s. To the Azores, with their abundant fresh water and fertile volcanic soils, went settlers from the Iberian mainland and also from Flanders. To the arid Cape Verde islands, Portugal sent administrators, political prisoners, and conversos: Jews whose compelled conversion to Christianity was suspect. Few women were sent from Portugal. The intention was to establish plantations and to import enslaved labor from the African mainland. The Portuguese men had children with African women, and, within a couple of generations, the Cape Verdean population was almost universally of mixed European and African heritage. As they spread out across the oceans, wherever Cape Verdeans have come to rest, they have been regarded as people of color. In terms of both the federal censuses for Nantucket and Town of Nantucket records, Cape Verdeans have sometimes been classified as Black and at other times as white. When José da Silva, born on Brava in 1794, was naturalized before the Nantucket Court of Common Pleas in 1824, he was described as “a free white person,” at that time a necessary classification for becoming a citizen of the United States. The distinction has, nonetheless, held on Nantucket as elsewhere: Azoreans have enjoyed white privilege and acceptance, and Cape Verdeans, as people of color, have faced racial discrimination.
According to the 1850 federal census, twenty-seven Azores-born men were resident on Nantucket. All but five of these Azorean men had local wives, and some were approaching their twentieth wedding anniversaries. Most of their families were large, with seven or eight children at home. As documented in the Eliza Starbuck Barney Genealogical Record, the Azoreans found wives from among the descendants of Nantucket’s English settlers. The rule was Azorean men marrying Nantucket women, but Henry and Theodate Starbuck’s son James B. Starbuck, born in 1819, married Maria C. Silvia from the island of Fayal, home to the Azorean whaling port of Horta. For Cape Verdeans, the potential for finding a wife on Nantucket was limited. The growing population of Nantucket’s New Guinea neighborhood, home to most of its non-white population, had reached 570 individuals in 1840, but of that number 423 were men and only 147 women. By 1850, as whaling from Nantucket declined, the population of New Guinea was falling, but men still outnumbered women by nearly three to one. One of the Cape Verdean whalemen who did manage to find a wife and establish a family was Joseph Lewis Sr. He married Julia Robinson, daughter of the Rev. John W. and Cecelia Robinson. Their son, Joseph Lewis Jr., went on one whaling voyage himself. Joseph Jr. and his unmarried sister Emma made their home together on the corner of West York Street and West York Lane, formerly the site of Nantucket’s AME Zion Church. From this convenient location Joseph Lewis Jr. served for a
Joseph Lewis Jr., September 1883, GPN3852.
Procession for the Feast of the Holy Ghost, 1912. A48-37b.
time later in life as one of the custodians of the Old Mill after it became a property of the Nantucket Historical Association.6
Before the establishment of St. Mary’s Cemetery in 1871, Azoreans went to their final rest in Nantucket’s old cemeteries, particularly in Newtown Cemetery, and Cape Verdeans were laid to rest in Nantucket’s Historic Coloured Cemetery.7 Some of the forces that drove men from the Azores and the Cape Verde islands onto whaleships were similar: volcanoes, pirates, and hunger. Earthquakes and eruptions rendered parts of the Azores unlivable from time to time, and the islands were plagued by raiders. Sometimes there was not enough to eat. Observance of the Feast of the Holy Ghost, a devotional practice associated
6 A letter from Captain B. W. Joy to the Inquirer and Mirror, Dec. 19, 1925, 1, memorializes Joseph Lewis Jr., whose death was announced in the same issue, as
“a thorough sailor” and recalled being together aboard ship “in many a stormy night off Cape Horn.” An article about the Old Mill in the Inquirer and Mirror,
June 11, 1949, 4, includes Joseph Lewis among the veteran whalemen who served as custodian of the mill.
7 There were exceptions. The graves of Cape Verdeans John and Lottie Deluz of
Fogo are to be found in Newtown Cemetery. with famine relief that dates to fourteenth-century Portugal, survives at its strongest in the Azores. Although the islands are verdant and fertile, generations of population growth on sea-girt land led to excess population in need of an outlet. As Francis Chapin put it in Tides of Migration, “It is said that always being in sight of the ocean gives Azoreans a vital sense of the possibility of going somewhere.”8 Coastal towns on the Cape Verde islands also suffered at the hands of pirates, but it was severe drought, famine, and vulcanism that drove Cape Verdean men onto whaleships where they were willing to work for food. From the mid-1700s, when deep-water whaling began in earnest, to the late 1860s, when whaling from Nantucket ended, five droughts and attendant famines struck the Cape Verde islands, resulting in massive death tolls. When the relief ship Emma, sent from Philadelphia during the famine of the 1830s, made first landfall at the island of San Antonio, its crew came
8 Francis Chapin, Tides of Migration: A Study of Migration Decision-Making and
Social Progress in São Miguel, Azores (New York: AMS Press, 1899), 70.
Anna Murphy, 1895, GPN3569, and John Murray Jr., 1884, GPN1437.
upon skeletal survivors on the shore too weak to raise a cheer for their salvation.9
On these dry islands, cultivation of sugar cane and cotton was unprofitable. There was nothing to export for the enrichment of Portugal and next to no means to sustain the imported population. Consequently, the administrators of the Cape Verde islands turned to the lucrative slave trade. The city of Ribeira Grande (now Cidade Velha) on the island of Santiago served as a way station between the west coast of Africa and the sugar plantations of Brazil. Most of the enslaved Africans who came to the island simply passed through, but West African men with weaving skills were retained. This was because woven strips of indigo-dyed cotton known as panos served as currency for the purchase of yet more people on the African mainland. Already by the 1600s, thousands of panos were required to meet demand, and the islands of Santiago and Fogo were centers of production. Fogo and Brava are the two Cape Verdean islands that have contributed most to emigration from the Cape Verde islands. Fogo (meaning fire) is an active volcano but is populated nonetheless. During the whaling period, it erupted five times, sending columns of smoke and fire high into the sky, serving as a beacon for whaleships. During eruptions, the residents would flee for their lives to the small companion island of Brava, where whaling vessels congregated in the anchorage of Fajã de Água. Men from Fogo as well as men from Brava joined the vessels there, and they were collectively known as Bravas.
When whaling from Nantucket collapsed in the 1850s, the arrival of both Azorean and Cape Verdean men ceased as well. Whaling continued out of New Bedford for half a century more, however. Some individuals who had gone whaling during these latter years eventually moved from New Bedford to Nantucket, keeping the masculine whaling tradition alive, but new waves of immigration from both island groups were about to bring whole families to Nantucket. The arrival of Azorean families came first, fueled by Portuguese political upheavals but also by two natural catastrophes. Wine production on the island of Pico had prospered, with its wines exported as far as the court of the Russian tsar. Then, the phylloxera aphid, which had destroyed French grapevines after crossing the Atlantic around 1850, also reached Pico, dealing a blow to that island’s economy. The island of São Miguel had grown prosperous exporting oranges to Britain; at about the same time that Pico’s vineyards were struck with phylloxera, a citrus blight arrived to wipe out São Miguel’s citrus crops. Azorean families, having lost so much, packed up and set out to make new lives in places well-known through their whaling contacts, destinations including Nantucket and New Bedford. By this time, Nantucket was in decline from the collapse of its whaling-based economy, and the population had dropped from over nine thousand in 1840 to just over four thousand by 1870. In 1895, barely three thousand people were residing on Nantucket. Some of the departing Nantucketers took their dwelling houses with them, ferrying them across to the mainland. Some vacant houses were demolished, and their brick and stone rubble used to construct a roadbed from town to the south shore as a tourist attraction, and still there was plenty of housing stock available for newcomers.10 The Azoreans filled niches that departing Nantucketers considered too unprofitable to pursue. They set about farming, fishing, and establishing neighborhood grocery stores. A series of Azorean men took over running the one surviving mill. What they lacked in capital, they made up for in optimism, and they were welcomed. When they constructed a building on Cherry Street to carry on their traditional social functions in their new home, naming it Alfonso Hall for the first king of Portugal, the dedication celebration included speeches by the chairman of the Board of Selectmen, state representative Arthur H. Gardner, and Rollin M. Allen, who had learned Portuguese as a child aboard his father’s ship. Captain John Murray arranged to have a crown brought from Portugal to be borne in annual processions on Orange Street between Alfonso Hall and the Church of St. Mary, Our Lady of the Isle, for the Feast of the Holy Ghost. Murray and his son became influential in the Nantucket business community to the point that when John Murray Sr. died in 1899, the businesses of Orange Street closed for the hour of his funeral.11 In 1895, at the same time they built Alfonso Hall, the Azoreans organized a local chapter of the Portuguese United Benevolent Association.12 Proceeds from the various activities held at Alfonso Hall, such as auctions held as part of the Holy Ghost observances, masquerades, dances, and receptions, supported the work of the local chapter. The early summer Holy Ghost processions and feasts continued from the mid 1890s to the mid 1930s, when participation thinned. A second charitable organization came into being in 1909: Branch 18 of the Portuguese Fraternity.13 Subsequently, both organizations appear repeatedly in
10 Inquirer and Mirror, Aug. 12, 1882, 2.
11 Inquirer and Mirror, Dec. 26, 1895, 1, Dec. 28, 1895, 1, Apr. 8, 1899, 1, and Apr. 15, 1899, 4.
12 The national Portuguese United Benevolent Association was founded in 1847.
Nantucket sources sometimes refer to it as the “Portuguese United Benevolent
Society” or just the Benevolent Society.
13 The Supreme Lodge of the Portuguese Fraternity of the United States of
America was incorporated in New Bedford in 1899 for the purpose of providing death and disability benefits for its members.
Alfonso Hall near Cherry and Williams streets, circa 1895. GPN4470.
cards of thanks and obituaries published in Nantucket newspapers. In 1915, a representative of Branch 5 of the Portuguese Fraternity came from New Bedford for the sixth anniversary of the founding of Branch 18, at a celebration held in Alfonso Hall.14
Nantucket Azorean activities began to subside in the 1930s. The Inquirer and Mirror reported that the 1934 Holy Ghost activities “were not on such an extensive scale as in some years.”15 Alfonso Hall was more and more rented out for dances, private parties, and even wrestling matches.16 By the beginning of the 1940s, the building was being referred to as Knights of Columbus Hall, and on May 14, 1949, The Inquirer and Mirror announced that to honor the late Father Joseph M. Griffin of St. Mary’s Church, “Knights of Columbus Hall, also known as Alfonso Hall . . . will be renamed and officially dedicated as Joseph M. Griffin Hall.”17 Nantucketers continued to call the building Knights of Columbus Hall, and some even continued to refer to it as Alfonso Hall, for many years after. The Cape Verdean immigrant family experience was different from the Azoreans’ experience. Nantucketers had tried many schemes to compensate for the loss of whaling, and, except for tourism, none had enjoyed success. At the beginning of the twentieth century, commercial cranberry cultivation offered hope. The Burgess Cranberry Company set out to radically alter the landscape in the area of Tashma’s Island, just north of
14 Inquirer and Mirror, July 31, 1915, 4.
15 Inquirer and Mirror, May 26, 1934, 4.
16 In 1923, “a number of Cape Verdeans who reside here” brought over the
Ultramarine Cape Verdean Band from the mainland to play for a dance at Alfonso Hall; Inquirer and Mirror, Sept. 8, 1923, 4.
17 Inquirer and Mirror, May 14, 1949, 1, and May 21, 1949, 5. Father Joseph served St. Mary’s Church from 1913 until his death in 1947. Milestone Road before it enters Siasconset village. Land was flattened, ditches excavated, and a water course constructed to bring water from Gibbs’s Pond, all to create what was then the world’s largest single cranberry bog. Labor for the leveling, planting, and harvesting of the bog was imported from the Cape Verde islands. At the time of the 1910 federal census, over one hundred Cape Verdean men, women, and children—many of them just arrived—were living and working on the bog, which was briefly known as “Cranberry Centre.” Significantly, TheInquirer and Mirror acknowledged repeatedly that there was a community of immigrants living at the bog. In 1909, for example, the paper reported on the wedding of Antone Correia and Marianna da Lomba, residents of “the Portuguese colony located on Tashma’s Island at Cranberry Centre.” Until the 1950s, weddings of couples of color were not permitted within St. Mary’s Church; they were only performed in the rectory on Orange Street. In the case of Antone Correia and Marianna da Lomba, the couple chose not to have a Catholic wedding. Instead, the wedding party was driven into town in a carriage, where a recently arrived Baptist pastor performed the ceremony in his home, not in the Summer Street Baptist Church. The bride and groom were then driven around town to visit friends. They returned by carriage to Cranberry Centre to a reception and dance that lasted until dawn. All of this was described in The Inquirer and Mirror. 18
In 1916, American anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons and Fogo-born Gregorio Teixeira da Silva traveled from New Bedford to Nantucket to collect Cape Verdean folklore from the bog workers. They were turned away
18 Inquirer and Mirror, May 22, 1909, 4.
The Burgess Cranberry Company bog north of Milestone Road. Cropped GPN4453.
by the company foreman, but they were able to meet with Cape Verdeans in town the following day. Teixeira da Silva died three years later. When their collection of stories and riddles from Cape Verdeans in New Bedford, Providence, Cape Cod, and Nantucket was published in 1923, Parsons dedicated it to his memory, referring to him as her teacher. One story in the collection is about a contest between an elephant and a whale, but unfortunately the location where Teixeira da Silva and Parsons heard it is not identified.19
The material Teixeira da Silva and Parsons collected was not told in standard Portuguese but in Cape Verdean Kriolu, a language that has developed in the Cape Verde islands with roots in both Portuguese and West African languages. Kriolu was the home language of the Cape Verdean immigrants and is not mutually intelligible with Portuguese. This has set Cape Verdeans apart from Azoreans, forcing them to use English as their common language.
19 Elsie Clews Parsons, Folk-Lore from the Cape Verde Islands. Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, vol. 15, pt. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., and New York: The American Folk-Lore Society with the Hispanic Society of America, 1923). Both Azoreans and Cape Verdeans settled into areas where there were inexpensive accommodations. Moving out of bog shanties and into town, Cape Verdean workers found some of their earliest housing on North Wharf and along Union and lower Orange streets, as well as in the Five Corners neighborhood, formerly known as New Guinea. Having established themselves years earlier, Azorean households were more dispersed in areas south of Main Street.
Cape Verdeans not only held themselves apart from Azoreans but also from the few African Americans on Nantucket, most of whom came to the island seasonally as domestics working for summer resident families. Cape Verdeans, from their point of view, were free-will immigrants; their ancestors had come to America on whaleships, not on slave ships. Nonetheless, as people of color, Cape Verdeans experienced racial prejudice on island as well as off island. For Nantucket Cape Verdeans, one of the most salient examples of racism is that not until the 1950s were Cape Verdean couples permitted to be married in St. Mary’s Church. In 1947, in the wake of World War II, Nantucket Cape Verdeans founded the Cape Verdean American Citizen-
ship Club, with both men and women as officers.20 Four decades went by before they formed a local chapter of the Sons and Daughters of the Arquipelago de Cabo Verde to celebrate the new status of their ancestors’ homeland. The islands had achieved independence from Portugal in 1975 and become a sovereign nation, celebrating July 5 as their Independence Day.21 In 1988, the Nantucket Sons and Daughters held a four-day festival at which the consulate general of the Republic of Cabo Verde presented the Nantucketers with a national flag, which was flown at Nantucket’s Town Building during the event. Activities took place at various sites, ending with Cape Verdean food, music, and dancing at Knights of Columbus Hall (Alfonso Hall). The festivals continued annually through 1994, moving to the American Legion Hall and then to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall in Tom Nevers, as each festival attracted more visitors from the mainland. By 1991, four to six hundred people were expected to attend, and the organizers hired a bus to transport visitors arriving by boat to the out-of-town location. Proceeds from the festivals were distributed in the form of scholarships to Nantucket High School graduating seniors, whether Cape Verdean or not.
The Nantucket Historical Association has recognized the island’s Cape Verdean heritage in a series of exhibitions and events. From October 2002 to February 2003, an exhibition called Jag! (for the traditional riceand-beans dish jagacida) was mounted in the Whitney Gallery at the Research Library. At the time, nearly one hundred Cape Verdean family photos were added to the NHA photographic collection, and Cape Verdean story-telling events took place. The Nantucket premiere of Claire Andrade-Watkins’s film Some Kind of Funny Porto Rican? was attended by a standing-room-only audience in the Nantucket Whaling Museum on August 27, 2006. The Shoulders Upon Which We Stand, an exhibition about Nantucket Cape Verdean elders and their children and grandchildren, was mounted in the Whaling Museum
20 Inquirer and Mirror, Aug. 16 and 23, 1947.
21 Unlike the Republic of Cabo Verde, the Azores remain a part of the nation of
Portugal, albeit an Autonomous Region since 1976. About the Author Twelfth-generation Nantucketer Frances Karttunen was educated in the local public schools. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. from Indiana University and was University Research Scientist in the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas, at Austin. One of Dr. Karttunen’s grandparents was a native Nantucketer and the other an immigrant from Finland. The difficulties they encountered were among the inspirations for her books Between Worlds and The Other Islanders: People Who Pulled Nantucket’s Oars. She is also the author of numerous other books and articles about Nantucket. In 2011, she was named a Nantucket Historical Association Research Fellow.
in 2021 and expanded in 2022 into the exhibition Cape Verde in Our Soul.
Azoreans and Cape Verdeans share Portuguese family names, Roman Catholicism, Portuguese cuisine, a connection with whaling, and a history of immigration to New England. They have been separated by home languages—Portuguese versus Cape Verde Kriolu—and by classification as white versus non-white. Yet, over decades, both groups have made immense contributions to Nantucket’s economy and culture, contributions worth remembering and celebrating as part of the island’s rich history.
