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The inhabitants of coastal Portugal and the Atlantic islands have always lived in close proximity to the sea, which both imprisoned them in their small world but also offered them the means to escape from it. It was through their activity as seamen, whalers and fishermen that so many islanders discovered the desire and also the means to emigrate, and it was the spirit of cooperation and interdependence, so essential for survival at sea, which determined that their emigration, historically so closely linked with seafaring, would be a family and community affair not just dependent on the decision of an individual.
Two intimate portraits of seafaring Portuguese show them at home on the ocean, no longer setting out as discoverers and conquistadores but seeking a livelihood beyond the limited horizons of their homeland.
Rudyard Kipling had never been to sea, but his book Captains Courageous (published in 1897), a rite-of-passage novel written as a children’s story but from an adult’s perspective, idealised the life of fishing schooners working on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. The hero of the story, Hervey Cheyne, is washed overboard from a liner but is fished out of the sea by Manuel, a Portuguese seaman line-fishing from a dory based on the schooner We’re Here. Hervey’s first sight of Manuel as he comes round is of a figure ‘showing a pair of little gold rings half hidden in curly black hair’.1 Manuel cheerfully informs him, ‘“I think you cut into baits by the screw, but you dreeft—you dreeft to me, and I make a big fish of you.”’
Harvey’s companion, Dan, explains that Manuel ‘rows Portugoosey; ye can’t mistake him’.2 Manuel talks in a sort of all-purpose ‘Dago’ dialect, which doesn’t sound very Portuguese, but this must be put down to Kipling’s irrepressible habit, not always successful, of trying to reproduce the language of ordinary working men and ordinary soldiers and sailors. ‘There is no to be thankful for to me!’ he says. ‘How shall I leave you dreeft, dreeft all around the Banks?’3 Manuel came originally from Madeira and had brought with him a banjo—one thinks of the Portuguese bringing the guitar to Hawaii. He had also, in traditional sailor fashion, made a model: ‘After supper I show you a little schooner I make with all her ropes. So we shall learn.’4 To Hervey he says,
‘We make you fisherman, these days. If I was you, when I come to Gloucester, I would give two, three big candles for my good luck.’
‘Give who?’
‘To be sure—the Virgin of our Church on the Hill [Our Lady of Good Voyage in Gloucester]. She is very good to fishermen all the time. That is why so few of us Portugee men ever are drowned.’
‘You’re a Roman Catholic then?’
‘I am a Madeira man. I am not a Porto-Pico [Azorean] boy. Shall I be Baptist then? … I always give candles—two, three more when I come to Gloucester. The good Virgin, she never forgets me, Manuel.’5
Manuel’s talk was slow and gentle—all about pretty girls in Madeira washing clothes in the dry beds of streams, by moonlight, under waving bananas; legends of saints, and tales of queer dances or fights away in the cold Newfoundland baiting-ports.6
Like so many Portuguese in exile, Manuel expressed himself in music, playing ‘the jangling, jarring little machete to a queer tune, and sang something in Portuguese about “Nina, innocente” ending with a full-handed sweep that brought the song up with a jerk.7
The Portuguese fisherman, for so many writers the pioneer of Portuguese emigration who opened up the route to the New World, also embodies the virtues implicit in a pre-industrial way of life. The life aboard the ocean-going fishing schooners, which made up the Portuguese White Fleet, required endurance, discipline and dedication. The schooner was the archetypal community in which every person’s life rested on the skill of the captain and the support that each member of the crew gave to his fellow. It was the perfect metaphor for society and was idealised by those who saw in the common life of the ordinary Portuguese seamen virtues that had been nearly lost in the more prosperous societies of the West.
In 1951 Alan Villiers described this ideal world, sailing with the Portuguese cod fishing fleet—the so-called White Fleet, which continued to sail from Portugal to the seas off Newfoundland and Greenland until the revolution of 1974 put a final end to the days of sail.
The Portuguese Bankers had formed the last sailing convoys. There were usually two each way every season; the older, slower schooners to the Grand Banks, and the bigger schooners, with the motor-ships, direct to Davis Straits. Each group went back to Portugal in its own convoy as it had sailed. Station-keeping was managed by sail-handling, particularly by means of the large fishermen’s stay sails set between the masts. Usually the sailing convoys kept to themselves, all the ships clearly marked with the Portuguese colour painted on their sides, bows, and counters; and all burning their navigation lights by night, unlike the great hurrying crowds of ordered steamers, deepladen and silent.8
The White Fleet was in many ways anachronistic—the schooners maintained by Portugal still powered by the wind when other fishing fleets had fully mechanised. The White Fleet was protected by the Salazar government to support the old way of life of the sea, just as it idealised and tried to preserve the life of the rural peasant on the land. ‘Here was a sailing ship,’ Villiers wrote, ‘a schooner in the old tradition, a vessel designed to be moved by the wind. Magellan could have stepped aboard, or Queiros, or Corte Real, Cabral, da Gama—any of them….’9
Villiers’ book, The Quest of the Schooner Argus, was a romantic farewell to a vanishing way of life, the life of the migrant labourer of the sea. ‘There was a democracy fore-and-aft,’ he wrote, and the ship’s community ran efficiently and without the conflict that Bullen, for example, found on the whalers. Many of the men were related and had sailed with the captain on previous voyages. They were in many respects a family. The schooner’s crew was divided between Azoreans and mainlanders, each of them taking separate watches, though Villiers pointed out that ‘this marked no schism between the Islanders and the mainland Portuguese, who were the best of friends’.10
The dangers of the doryman’s life are traditional and remain unchanged—the dangers of swamping, of being overwhelmed in the sea, lost in fog, run down by shipping, smashed against his own ship in a seaway. Alone upon the North Atlantic, often out of sight of his mother-ship and a hundred miles and more from the nearest land, his boat a little thing of fragile planks without power of any kind and without even a rudder, with a home-made sail and an oar or two his only means of making headway through the water, compelled to overload if he is to fish usefully at all, and forced to remain habitually upon the turbulent water of the fog-bound Banks or the stormy shallow seas off Greenland, never knowing when he leaves his ship in the morning that he will come safely back again at night, his food in the dory always cold, his dory without shelter and as exposed as a raft or a piece of driftwood, it is certain that if he were not sustained by his religion and his long traditions, he could never venture to be a doryman.11
The skills and endurance of the doryman were legendary.
A small Algarvian caique [a single-masted sailing boat] had once sailed to Rio de Janeiro. This had happened in 1807, at the beginning of the Peninsular War, when the Algarvians were among the first to fight. This they did—against heavy odds—with such success at Olhao… that the townspeople decided to send the good news….12
Six months at sea and away from friends and family, the fishermen nevertheless kept in touch with home, just as emigrants would try to do.
Once a week there was a special programme broadcast from Portugal for the men on the Banks…. A recording unit went round to each of the principal fishing ports in turn, and recorded brief messages from wives and children at home….These programmes were called the Hora de Saudade, the hour of longing: they were the only relaxation the dorymen knew, and they were tremendously appreciated. They were arranged by the Gremio [the fishermen’s association] at Lisbon, and have been a feature of the Portuguese Banks fishing for more than a decade.13
The mother ship of the fleet was the hospital and supply boat Gil Eanes.
The arrival of the Gil Eanes, with Captain Tavares de Almeida as the representative of the Gremio and a sort of Portuguese admiral of the Grand Banks and Greenland, was an important event…. The ancient Gil Eanes, which was nothing but a little 2,000 tonner built as a short haul tramp, was the only hospital ship on the Banks or, indeed, in the North Atlantic and she was a most useful vessel.14
The old ship was replaced in 1955 by a brand new hospital ship which was given the same name and which is preserved today in the port of Viana do Castelo.
The men who manned the schooners and fished from the little dories gave Villiers an insight into what governed the lives of migrant workers and turned many of them into permanent emigrants.
She [the schooner Vaz] had as mate an ancient codhunter who had long been master in his own right, and then retired, only to sicken of what seemed to him the aimless life ashore at Ilhavo, and seek a berth afloat again. He did not care for the responsibility of being master, though he had several sons who were masters in the fleet. It may be (as was hinted more than once, though never by Ilhavans) that Ilhavo was something of a matriarchy. Certainly the women there had been left to their own devices while their menfolk were at sea for six to nine months of the year, for at least four and a half centuries. The seafaring traditions of Ilhavo, indeed, went back a good deal further than that, for it had always been noted for its sailors and its fishermen. There were critics who declared that the women of Ilhavo were so accustomed to the undisputed command of their homes and everything in sight, that they now ran Ilhavo and the menfolk too, and the only retreat a man knew was a ship. Whether this was so or not I don’t know, but there were fishing communities in which such conditions appeared to prevail. At Nazare, for instance, it was said the women took the fish from the men as they landed, sold them, and only doled out to the fishermen a few niggardly centavos of tobacco.15
Villiers saw in the Portuguese fishermen of the White Fleet the virtues and strength of character which he thought were only to be found at sea, and these he set out in a series of pen portraits. They are portraits of the sort of men who in earlier times had been the pioneers, founding the emigrant Portuguese communities throughout the world.
Consider, for example, such a man as Francisco Emilio Battista … First Fisher of the Argus since she was built…. He was a lithe, slight man, without an ounce of superfluous fat, with a strong, dark face, and fierce, imperious eyes. He had strong wrists, great hands and a ready smile despite the hardships of his chosen life. Above all he had an infinite capacity for thoroughness in all he did or thought of doing, singleness of purpose and the ability to go straight for what he aimed at, and to keep going despite all difficulties. His energy was boundless, and his strength of will indomitable.… His father Jose fished for forty campaigns upon the Banks and died in the Algarve at the age of seventy.16
Francisco Emilio Battista was a simple man, an illiterate, and consequently debarred from entry to the USA and… Australia. Yet he was a man whose knowledge was his own, gained and secure in his own mind, a man educated by life and not misled by nonsense, a man who knew and got on with the job for which he was fitted, a man untroubled by political slogans, uninhibited by any confusion of besetting doubts, unhampered by theories, complacent or destructive. His way of life was set, and for him and his happy kind it was enough: his feet were upon the earth though half the year they trod the frail planks of an arctic dory. He was a man—I thought—very close to God—he, and all dorymen. Down upon the sea, his life in his hands, he knew the way of the sea and the way of the Lord. And, knowing these things, he was fortunate.17
Francisco Martins … was a handsome young man, a born fisherman…. His father was a Banker before him: fishing was the only life the family knew.… He had had to swim several times, and he knew he had been lucky to survive. He did not want to expose his children to those risks, though he accepted them cheerfully himself. He would like them to go to America, or perhaps South Africa, or Australia, for there were too many people in the Azores. It was not good to remain crowded upon an island, even so lovely an island as St Michael’s [Sao Miguel]. As for himself, he was happy enough at his work—he certainly always gave that impression…. But six months was a long time to be gone from home.18
The Portuguese who fished on the Grand Banks, like the rural peasants who set out from the Minho or the Azores to the New World, clung to the ‘old ways’ with a kind of conservatism which gave them a sense of security against the dangers of life at sea or the unknown hazards of life in the Americas.
The truth was that they were as conservative as they were courageous. New ideas for the ship—yes: they were acceptable and the dorymen could see their great advantages. But new ideas in the dories were entirely different, and not to be tolerated. The ship was something in which they lived and slept and cleaned and salted fish; but their dories—why, they were their lives.19