3
There are five groups of islands in the Atlantic which, since the fifteenth century, have played a very important part in the history of Portugal, although they are given very little attention by historians who are usually preoccupied with developments on the Iberian peninsula. Yet the long history of the Portuguese diaspora is as much a story of the people who left the islands as of those who left mainland Portugal.
The Canary Islands
The Canary Islands are the group nearest to Europe and have been known to Europeans since Roman times. From the late thirteenth century Portuguese seamen regularly visited the islands to raid for slaves or to hunt seals in the neighbouring Moroccan waters. Attempts were made by Portuguese, Castilians, French and Genoese to settle, but these were largely unsuccessful since the islands had a native population which fiercely resisted conquest. During the fifteenth century sovereignty over the islands was contested between Portugal and Castile until the dispute was finally resolved in favour of Castile in 1479. By that time a considerable number of Portuguese had settled on the islands and remained there as Castilian subjects, Castilian sovereignty not preventing further Portuguese migrants coming to join their compatriots. The Canary Islands provided many of the early settlers in Cuba and it is likely that it was from the Canaries that a number of Portuguese joined Spanish expeditions to the New World. For example, there was a large contingent of Portuguese in the expedition that Hernando de Soto led into the North American interior in 1539, including the chronicler of the expedition.
Madeira: settlement and onward migration
The settlement of Madeira and Porto Santo began after 1419 as the Portuguese were anxious to pre-empt any move to occupy the islands by the Castilians. To organise the settlement of these islands, and later the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, the Portuguese Crown appointed hereditary ‘donatary captains’ who assumed the responsibility for settling, defending and developing the islands in return for being able to exercise jurisdiction, allocate land, found towns, collect taxes and enjoy seigneurial rights over fisheries, mills, bread ovens and wine presses. Unlike the military nobility who served in the Moroccan fortresses, the men who took up the island captaincies intended to settle and found families, though during the fifteenth century there was some reluctance on the part of the upper echelons of Portuguese society to take up these opportunities, and at least two of the early island captains (Bartolomeu Perestrello and Antonio di Noli) were Genoese and one, Josse Huerter, came from the Netherlands.
Settlers were offered land according to the terms of the Lei das Sesmarias, and Madeira, in particular, proved attractive to settlers. The island was well watered and fertile but was covered by trees. The earliest settlers burned away tracts of forest—the Venetian traveller Cadamosto recalling that so fierce were the flames that the settlers had to stand in the sea for two days until the fires had burnt out and they could come ashore. Malvoisie grapes were introduced and flourished, and Cadamosto claimed that ripe grapes could be picked in Holy Week. Sugar and wheat were also grown and the island produced sawn timber (while the natural forests lasted) and wood for bows and crossbow bolts.1 By 1460 there were two established towns, Funchal, the most important, becoming in 1514 the seat of a diocese which had supervision over church affairs in Africa and Asia until 1551. The neighbouring island of Porto Santo was also settled, though the drier climate of the island and the fact that it was soon overrun by wild rabbits discouraged intensive agriculture.
Agriculture, particularly sugar production, increased the demand for labour and as early as the 1440s voyages were being organised by the captains to obtain slaves in the Canary Islands and on the African coast. Slaves were brought to Madeira to produce the wine and sugar that were sold in Portugal, their arrival adding new elements to the Portuguese diaspora that was now beginning. In this way the triangular Atlantic trade was first articulated, though not in the classic form of later years. To attract settlers, the Crown granted commercial privileges which took the form of a remission of duties for goods imported into Portugal; and as the economies of the Atlantic islands developed, intricate commercial networks grew up linking the island groups to each other as well as to Portugal and the African mainland. As so much of the wealth of the islands was derived from trade, it is not surprising that the leading island families became a mercantile aristocracy which took an active part in commerce.
The social and economic structures that determined how Madeira would develop had already been put into place during the first century of settlement, structures that were to be copied on the other islands settled by the Portuguese. Land was concentrated in the hands of relatively few owners, who established entails and rented out the land to tenant farmers. The landowners also controlled the irrigation system, the levadas, on which the farmers depended to raise their crops. The concentration on growing sugar, and later on producing wine for export, resulted in high prices for food which benefited the large landowners and merchants but frequently led to famine for the other islanders. Moreover, the steep mountain valleys of Madeira, very picturesque as they seemed to later visitors, limited the amount of land available for farming, so much so that cattle had no pasture and had to be stall-fed and there was no room for surplus population. From at least the seventeenth century there was a constant food deficit and the island was unable to feed its growing population. John Barrow, the man who was to mastermind Britain’s exploration of the Arctic, visited Madeira in 1792. He described how
the proprietor of the land and the collector of taxes for the Crown both attend at the press; the latter takes out of the tub his tenth of the whole must, after which the remainder is equally divided between the land-owner and the tenant. Each takes with him a sufficient number of porters to carry away their respective shares, sometimes in barrels, and sometimes in goat-skin borrachas, to the cellars in Funchal. The English merchants usually supply the farmers beforehand with money, to enable them to make a more extensive tillage.2
In the seventeenth century the British established a factory under privileges granted to them in the treaty signed between Portugal and the Commonwealth government in 1654. Over the course of the next 200 years British merchants, who provided the islanders with the main market for their wine, came to have a firm grip on the economy of the island, typically buying up the grape harvest at prices fixed by themselves. East India Company ships regularly called at Funchal and a sizeable British community established itself there. To Barrow, ‘the penurious and solitary life of the Portugueze forms a striking contrast with the splendid and convivial manner in which the houses of the English merchants are constantly kept open for the accommodation of strangers who may call at the island’.3 In 1807, during a critical phase of the Napoleonic Wars, the British occupied Madeira and for three months the island was even annexed as a British colony before being handed back to Portugal.
With the decline of Madeira’s sugar industry in the seventeenth century, emigration to Brazil began and the regular visits of foreign ships provided an easy opportunity for those wanting to leave an island that was now suffering from serious over-population. Madeira’s population had grown steadily from around 25,000 in 1580 to an estimated 67,000 in 1800 and, in spite of substantial emigration, to 148,300 by 1900.4 Emigration on a large scale began in the 1830s, the presence of the British community creating many opportunities for departure. Emigrants found it easy to obtain a passage, many departing without passports from the neighbouring Deserta Islands, away from the controls that the Portuguese administration tried to implement. From the British West Indies and later Hawaii came agents intent on recruiting labourers with knowledge of the sugar industry, and in the first decade after 1835 12,000 Madeirans departed for British Guiana alone, a total of 36,724 Madeirans settling in that colony between 1841 and 1889.5
Emigration from Madeira was increased by a rather bizarre development which led to a major exodus from the island. In 1838 an evangelical Protestant doctor called Robert Kalley had brought his wife to Madeira for health reasons. As a result of his work as preacher and doctor the charismatic Kalley built up a large community of converts. Persecuted by the authorities, Kalley eventually decided to move to Trinidad and was accompanied by many of his converts, who eventually numbered over 2,000, many eventually relocating to Illinois.6
As the nineteenth century progressed, agricultural conditions on the islands deteriorated. Famine conditions resulted from the failure of the potato crop in 1847, and diseases affecting the vines in the following decade severely damaged the island’s economy and drove still more Madeirans to emigrate. Thereafter the numbers grew steeply. Madeiran emigrants tended to follow a chain of migration and to form close-knit communities at their destinations. Unlike the Azoreans who headed for the United States and later Canada, the favoured destinations of Madeiran emigration were the British and French Caribbean islands, Hawaii, Angola and South Africa.7
The Azores
The settlement of the Azores began in the 1430s but proceeded more slowly than that of Madeira. The nine islands of the archipelago were more distant from Portugal and their climate was less favourable for the production of wine and sugar—though in later centuries oranges and tea were to be grown successfully. The Azores were distributed as captaincies, but settlers had to be recruited from as far afield as the Netherlands, the first captain of the islands of Pico and Faial being Josse Huerter, a Netherlander who apparently attracted between 1,000 and 2,000 Flemish immigrants. The Azorean settlers adapted to their new oceanic world by establishing a thriving fishing industry and were soon undertaking voyages of their own further into the Atlantic. In fact the Azores became a new base for maritime exploration, and expeditions were organised by Azoreans to lay claim to islands which they believed lay beyond their horizons to the west.
By the middle of the sixteenth century the islanders were growing wheat and rearing cattle. A number of towns had been established, and in 1546 Ponta Delgada on the island of São Miguel was made a city with a Senado da Câmara. The Azores were, however, beset by problems. The islands lay in an active volcanic zone which caused frequent earthquakes and eruptions. An earthquake in 1522 totally destroyed the town of Vila Franca do Campo on São Miguel, when allegedly 5,000 people were buried in its rubble. There were also seismic events in the islands’ politics. From the 1570s British pirates frequented Azorean waters attempting to waylay the Spanish silver flota, while the Portuguese pretender, Dom António, tried to use the islands as a base against Philip of Spain in the 1580s. Sea battles took place off the Azores and the islands were invaded and bloodily subdued by Spanish forces. ‘In 1579,’ wrote Gaspar Fructuoso, the sixteenth-century Azorean historian, ‘a year of penury, like so many years before it, the islanders were so mired in poverty that they could no longer continue as they were…. Some were persuaded to emigrate to Brazil to escape their misery….’ The first migration in Azorean history had begun.8
After Portugal’s declaration of its independence from Spain in 1640 the islands no longer played a key role in Atlantic commerce. However, the production of wheat was of importance to Portugal which always suffered a deficit in wheat production. The islands also produced quantities of woad which was sold as a dye to the English. Meanwhile volcanic eruptions continued to cause loss and hardship—there were serious eruptions in 1614, 1630, 1649, 1652, 1659, 1672 and 1718—and to undermine the ability of the islands to support their population.9
The population of the Azores initially grew relatively slowly, but by the middle of the seventeenth century it had outstripped that of Madeira. The most populous islands were São Miguel, Faial and Pico with 30,000, 9,000 and 10,000 inhabitants respectively. In the first half of the eighteenth century the Azores as a whole had a population density of 48 per square kilometre compared with 17–20 per square kilometre for mainland Portugal; and by 1796 the population of the archipelago stood at 156,256—a density of 66.6 per square kilometre.10 The pressure of population was becoming severe and increasingly during the eighteenth century voices were raised suggesting that emigration would help restore some equilibrium between population and the land. In fact significant numbers of islanders had already begun to emigrate to Brazil, attracted by the discoveries of gold and diamonds and the opening of virgin land in the south, the settlement of Santa Caterina receiving an influx of 5,915 Azoreans and Rio Grande do Sul 1,400.11 In spite of this, at the end of the century the captain-general, Denis Gregório Mendonça, referring specifically to the island of Terceira, bemoaned the fact that few men and virtually no women were emigrating, and asked: ‘What disorders will result from this excess of population, the largest part of which is poor and miserable? The women prostitute themselves, men become robbers and everyone becomes a burden and inconvenience to the public.’12
By the middle of the nineteenth century the population had risen to nearly 250,000 and emigration was being recommended as a matter of urgency. Most of this growing population were rural farmers, but as land had been concentrated in the hands of a few large landowners who established entails to safeguard their family inheritance, the bulk of the population either rented small parcels of land or worked as wage labourers. Tenancies were usually for only a small number of years and, as the population grew, competition for land pushed up rents and increased economic instability. Wage labourers also suffered since work was only available on an irregular basis for much of the year. As a large part of the grain that was produced was exported by the commercial and landowning class, in defiance of royal decrees trying to limit the practice, the price of food was always very high and the population experienced famine conditions even in years of plenty.13 By the early nineteenth century much of the population lived in extreme misery. As one observer wrote in 1806, outside the towns, substantial houses ‘give way to four low walls, covered by a miserable thatch of straw; and in this mean and wretched refuge, built frequently on someone else’s land, lives a family of real proletarians, without any property and without any employment’.14 In 1800, out of 5,651 people on the island of Terceira whose occupations are recorded, half were day labourers; while in Faial out of 5,228 half were tenant farmers and a quarter were day labourers.15 The parallels with the history of Ireland are striking.
Attempts to bring more land under cultivation and to enclose the grazing pastures and woodland on the higher hillsides, measures which might have led to improved agricultural output, were firmly resisted both by the landowners and also by the poor who depended on access to these areas. As Luís Mendonça and José Avila wrote, ‘in the opinion of one of the civil governors of Angra, the failure to make use of the waste lands figures as one of the principal causes of the phenomenon of migration’.16
The social structure of the Azores meant that, for the majority of the population, the whole family, including children, had to work on small family farms or in casual employment. There were few spare resources available for education, or capital for setting up businesses. There were no industries on the islands beyond domestic artisan crafts and some construction, and fishing was the only supplement to agriculture. Although the growing of woad in the seventeenth century and of oranges for the European market in the nineteenth gave the islands an opportunity to develop exports and accumulate capital, the Azores did not benefit as Madeira did from a large expatriate community. Moreover the Portuguese elites preferred to spend their wealth embellishing churches rather than investing in infrastructure or industry.
However, some foreign ships did call and from the 1760s onwards the islands were increasingly visited by British and American whalers. Until whaling was finally banned in 1987, Azoreans hunted the whales using small open boats, landing the carcasses on the beaches for the messy business of cutting and boiling.17 By the mid nineteenth century whaling had become a big business for shipowners, particularly those from the eastern seaboard of the United States. Azoreans were recruited as crew on the whalers, some eventually rising in the ranks to provide the United States with skippers for its whaling fleet. In this way there began a small exodus of adventurous Azorean men to the United States, establishing communities that soon set in motion a chain migration across the Atlantic.
However, in the Azores, as elsewhere, there was never a simple equation whereby poverty equalled a decision to emigrate. When large-scale emigration began it was not always the poorest who sought to leave the islands first. Emigration, which may sometimes appear to have been a mass movement, was in fact always made up of the decisions of individuals, and in making these decisions the factors that appear to have been decisive were whether the individual knew someone who had already emigrated, whether he or she had the means to pay for a passage and maintain himself or herself in another country, and whether the opportunity to emigrate presented itself.
Azorean emigrants took with them a distinctive culture which set them somewhat apart from other Portuguese. The peasants and day labourers of the Azores had led a very isolated existence. Not only were the islands located 900 miles from Portugal, but the communities were dispersed across nine islands, some of them, like Corvo, very small. Even on the larger islands communities might be very cut off from one another other. Below the towering cliffs of São Jorge small villages had been built on the fajãs, patches of land formed on the edge of the sea by landslips or the estuaries of small streams. These villages might only be accessible by precipitous mountain paths or by sea. As Jerry Williams wrote,
virtually all of the inhabitants were born, reared and eventually died on the island of their birth. Frequently, the whole life cycle took place in a single village. Living in the same village generation after generation eventually resulted in an extended family system whereby virtually everyone in a particular village was related, either by blood or through an intricate and reciprocal system of god-parentage.18
When individual Azoreans began to emigrate, members of the extended family soon followed and the close-knit village community was, in part, recreated wherever the migrants ended up. It has been suggested that this factor, as well as the continuing poverty of life in the islands, probably accounts for the relatively small number of Azorean emigrants who ever returned to the islands.
Emigrants also took with them the festivals associated with the Holy Spirit. This cult had been introduced into Portugal from Germany by Saint Isabel in the fourteenth century, and although the somewhat riotous celebrations which grew up had gradually been banned in Portugal, they continued to flourish in the Azores where they were believed to offer protection against the earthquakes and epidemics which periodically devastated the islands. Although attempts were made to suppress this cult, it became the focus for an insular religious culture which coalesced around the so-called impérios, elaborate little chapels which each community erected and where the ‘emperors’ and ‘empresses’ were crowned.19
By the early twentieth century conditions in the Azores had changed little from a century earlier. The economy was still largely based on agriculture and the only industries, mostly located on the island of São Miguel, were concerned with processing the sugar, tobacco and tea grown on the islands. Only 12 per cent of the population found employment in these industries.20 As late as 1978 it was estimated that 70 per cent of the land in the Azores was still being farmed on a small scale by tenant farmers.21 The rise of dairy farming in the twentieth century, while providing the islands with an export commodity, put further pressure on the land available for peasant farmers; but ironically it provided Azorean emigrants with the basic skills which they were successfully able to exploit in the dairy farms of California.
Alfred Lewis’s novel Home is an Island describes rural life in the Azores before the First World War. It is a tale steeped in nostalgia in which the islands are a kind of forgotten Eden. The parents of the young José are part of a close-knit and supportive village community, but they can envisage only two possible futures for their son: to become a priest or to emigrate to America. The emigrants may have left the islands but had not entirely abandoned them. The boy, as he grows, is aware that
every house had its own past; from every home had departed, one day, a young man. A few went to America, some to Africa and Brazil. Not all of them came back. And so the spirits of those who had died, pursued by nostalgia, even in death, returned. They came back as strange never-before-seen birds; or as a sign, any noise, issuing from the forests of the island; perhaps the falling of a stone from an apparently sound wall; or the rasping of a window pane by an insect.22
The Cape Verde Islands and Guinea
The Cape Verde Islands, discovered in the 1450s, were situated on the latitude of the Sahara; although possessing rich volcanic soils, they suffered from irregular rainfall. Moreover they were far from Portugal. Granted like Madeira and the Azores to ‘donatary captains’, the islands struggled to attract immigrants. In 1466 the Crown granted the settlers special commercial privileges to enable them to develop trade with Guinea, but there were still relatively few settlers when the islands were attacked by a Castilian fleet in 1474 and the people, including the captains, were deported. By the end of the fifteenth century only two of the islands, Santiago and Fogo, had a sizeable population. To resolve the difficulties in populating the islands, the captains began to import slaves in large numbers to provide a workforce and, as the demand across the Atlantic grew, to be sold on to Spanish America.
Although the Portuguese population remained small, the islands came to assume an importance out of all proportion to the size of their settlements or the productivity of their agriculture. Lying on the main sea routes taken by sailing ships, they provided convenient ports of call for ships bound for the Estado da Índia or Brazil. Frequently visited by fleets, a racially mixed population was swollen by the members of ships’ crews left behind as well as by the slaves imported for onward sale.
Most of the settlement was concentrated in and around the port-city of Ribeira Grande on the island of Santiago, which in the sixteenth century enjoyed considerable wealth as a centre for trading with West Africa as well as for servicing India- and Brazil-bound fleets. In 1513 the corregedor, Pedro Guimarães, described the population of the Ribeira Grande as follows:
There are fifty-eight settlers who are vizinhos, white men of honourable status. There are sixteen black vizinhos and there are fifty-six estantes estrangeiros who are natives of your kingdoms. There are four unmarried women and ten black women as well as other foreigners who are now here with their ships and will leave. There are twelve clerics and three friars among whom are two preachers.23
This description gives a good idea of the divisions of status within the Portuguese community. Clear distinctions were made between vizinhos, men of substance who could hold public office, and the so-called estantes estrangeiros who were new arrivals from Portugal, and between the white and the free black population. During the sixteenth century the population grew until Santiago had between 500 and 600 vizinhos. Many of the vizinhos had acquired entailed estates (morgadios), and later in the century there emerged a clear distinction between vizinhos and moradores, the former being men of property who monopolised local offices while the latter were immigrants who acquired their status by four years of residence. In 1546 black vizinhos were included among those who might hold public office, and among the privileges of their status were membership of the Misericórdias and religious brotherhoods, the right to elect town councillors, the right to serve in the militia and to aspire to the holding of morgadios or capelas. The ordinary moradores were often excluded from ownership of morgadios and made their living through trade with Guinea, importing among other things grain for sale to the visiting fleets.24
The vizinhos and moradores had originally been European Portuguese, but there was a steady erosion of the racial exclusiveness of these categories which gathered momentum in the seventeenth century. Legitimate children inherited their father’s status even when their mothers were black, while illegitimate children could be declared legitimate by a royal letter. This process of legitimisation, which opened the door to inheriting property and holding public office, bound the Cape Verdeans strongly to Portugal. However remote metropolitan Portugal might seem from the everyday life of the islands, the need to obtain recognition of one’s social, and hence economic, status from a distant Portuguese king bound this diasporic population back to the homeland by strong if invisible ties.25
Below the vizinhos and moradores was the mass of the population, white, mulatto and black, some slave and some free, who were excluded from the ownership of the relatively small areas of good land and had to live either as rent-paying peasants or by eking out a living as artisans or farmers in the drier and more remote areas. Thus the social divisions of the islands were not just those of master and slave but of the few wealthy landowners and merchants and the landless poor.26
As well as slaves there were also free black immigrants. Lisa Andrade describes how ‘in the peopling of the islands there was not only the slaves but also the free blacks … who spontaneously accompanied the merchants, missionaries and ships’ captains; many among them spoke the Portuguese language and some went to Santiago to be made Christian’.27 To these she might have added refugees from the wars of the mainland, particularly important following the ‘Mane’ invasions of the second half of the sixteenth century.
Charles Boxer wrote of the Cape Verdean population: ‘Over succeeding centuries the racial amalgam in the islands was complete, the Negro element predominating in the physical make-up and the Portuguese in the cultural façade.’28 The Cape Verdean population of the sixteenth century had strong economic and social ties that bound them closer to Africa than to Portugal. The islands became centres of the African diaspora as slaves were brought to the island for onward sale to the New World after undergoing a brief and superficial ladino ‘make-over’. As for the free inhabitants, although few had ever seen Portugal or had any close relations with metropolitan Portuguese, they retained a strong sense of being Portuguese and of enjoying the rights and privileges of subjects of the Portuguese Crown. And as free blacks in the dangerous world of the eighteenth-century Atlantic, they might use their Portuguese citizenship to claim exemption from capture and enslavement. The Jesuit António Vieira, writing in the seventeenth century, described ‘clergy and canons as black as jet, but so well-bred, so authoritative, so learned, such great musicians, so discreet and so accomplished that they may be envied by those in our own cathedrals at home’.29 This Portuguese identity did not depend on race as such but was fixed by a wide range of cultural markers which included names, devotion to the Catholic church, house types and urban space, and European technologies. Their African heritage was most clearly seen in skin colour and phenotype, in agriculture, food and cooking, domestic life generally (for example the carrying of babies tied to the back of the mother) and a wide range of beliefs and practices which defined their understanding of the real and spiritual world. In between the European and African grew up a musical tradition, typically represented in the morna, and a creole language that drew on both the European and the African heritage.
However, most of the island communities were desperately poor. A sad portrait of the convict settlement in the Cape Verde Islands is given in the account of George Fenner’s visit in 1566. Having found ‘five or six small houses’ on Boa Vista, the English fell in with two Portuguese who ‘were but poore & simple, and gave each of them a paire of shoes’. They then sailed to a small island, possibly Sal, where they found
in all the Iland… not above 30 persons, which were banished men for a time, some for more yeeres, some for lesse, and amongst them there was one simple man which was their captaine. They live upon goats flesh, cocks, hennes, and fresh water: other victuals they none, saving fish, which they esteeme not, neither have they any boats to take them.
The rent to the landowner was paid in skins and ‘hath bene sent foorth of the sayd Iland into Portugall 40000 skins in one yeere’. The islanders also had ‘great store of the oyle of Tortoises’.30
The careless exploitation of the islands and the attempts to grow exportable crops, but chiefly the grazing of animals, damaged the fragile ecology. Although the islands were covered with vegetation when first discovered, by the eighteenth century many of them had become barren and semi-desert. Today Boa Vista looks like an island fragment of the Sahara, but driving over the island reveals that at one time it was divided into estates by long stone walls, and that there were farms and villages which now lie abandoned in the interior. In some islands desert conditions were so severe that they would not support any inhabitants—in spite of possessing in Porto Grande a magnificent protected anchorage, the island of São Vicente was almost totally unpopulated the few wretched individuals on the island were described in 1836 as living in a state of ‘nudez absoluta’.31 However, although the environment of the islands deteriorated and the severe climatic conditions made agriculture increasingly difficult, the population continued to grow, showing a remarkable fertility in spite of the frequent devastating famines and consequent high rates of mortality. Unable to survive through agriculture, the islanders exploited whatever meagre resources they could. Orchil, a form of lichen, was collected, but its sale was controlled by monopolists appointed by the Crown;32 purgueira seeds were exported for the Portuguese soap industry; and the manufacture of cotton cloth, salt and rum continued for the African market.
Almost from the beginning of settlement in the fifteenth century, the Cape Verdeans had looked beyond their islands to make a living, and emigration, temporary, seasonal or semi-permanent, became rooted in their culture. Islanders would cross to Guinea to trade or to plant seasonal crops in the so-called pontas, wetland farms leased from local African communities. There were also opportunities presented by visiting ships. There were always ships at anchor off the main island of Santiago enabling islanders to make a living selling to the visiting sailors or shipping aboard foreign vessels as crew. The main ports of the island were surprisingly cosmopolitan and their population a mixture of peoples from all over the world. They were places where slavers, pirates and the crews of East Indiamen rubbed shoulders with slaves from Africa, convicts and prostitutes. The administrators, priests and officials from Portugal were few in number and largely strangers in their own land.
Barrow, who visited Santiago in 1792, commented that
the only Europeans we saw were the Governor, his secretary, the officer commanding of the troops, a raw-boned Scottish serjeant six feet high, and his wife… The clergy were people of colour, and some of them perfectly black. The officers of justice, of the customs, and other departments in the civil and military services, the troops, the peasantry, and the traders, were all blacks, or at least so very dark that they could scarcely be supposed to have any mixture of European blood in their veins. Yet most of them aspire to the honour of Portugueze extraction, and are proud of tracing their origin to a race of heroes who, disdaining the restraints of laws at home, contrived to get themselves transported abroad, where their free and ungovernable spirits could exert themselves without control. The Cap de Verd islands were to Portugal what Botany Bay is to England, an asylum for convicted criminals.33
Each of the other islands, he says, ‘has its black governor, who is solely dependent on the governor General. The power and situation of the latter are little to be envied. Disease and want surround his habitation, and misery is ever before his eyes’34 The islands had been suffering three years of drought.
In expressing my surprize to the secretary, that the mother country, so far from employing precautions, had taken no steps to procure succours, against a calamity so dreadful and of such long continuance, he observed that the Court of Lisbon considered these poor islands, and the few black subjects scattered over them, of too little importance to demand any part of its care or attention; that they produced very little revenue to the Crown, which arose chiefly from a monopoly of the slave trade on the coast, and from the sale of an exclusive privilege of supplying the Brazils with salt.35
‘In short’, Barrow says, ‘the whole place is so miserable that I shall forbear any further description.’36
In the mid eighteenth century the rise of the American whaling industry brought whalers to the island of Brava as their principal port of call. Cape Verdeans sold their services to the Americans as crews for the whaling ships, which were often absent from the United States for years on end and found difficulty recruiting American crews. By the nineteenth century expert Cape Verdean boatmen and harpooners were actively sought and, like the Azoreans, many became officers on board the whalers. When the ships eventually docked in New Bedford or Nantucket the Cape Verdeans came ashore. Some stayed and small communities of ‘Bravas’ were formed. Once Cape Verdean communities became established, the end of the migration chain had become firmly anchored. More and more islanders crossed the Atlantic to join their countrymen, some braving the ocean in open boats, others as crew or stowaways, and the numbers rose as drought and famine affected the islands ever more frequently.
In the 1850s ships powered by steam began to replace sail, and in the 1860s the first submarine telegraph cables were laid. Porto Grande on the island of São Vicente now came into its own as a coaling depot. British coaling firms set up shop and the population of barren São Vicente grew rapidly. To join the coaling companies came the Western Telegraph Company and its employees. A sizeable foreign community grew up in what was cheerfully known as the ‘Cinder Heap’, with its golf course and cricket club, and by the last quarter of the nineteenth century Porto Grande had become one of the busiest ports of the Atlantic. People from all the islands came to São Vicente to seek work, attracted also by the opportunities to find a passage to America or Brazil. The opportunities for Cape Verdeans to emigrate were now plentiful and their diaspora had begun.
No figures exist to tell the story of emigration in the nineteenth century, but figures from 1900 until 1920 (when the United States first put up barriers to Cape Verdean immigration) show that 18,629 islanders left officially for the United States with a further 1,968 going to destinations in South America. One can only speculate how many went unofficially to avoid paying for passports or to escape military service.37
Migration and social mobility in the history of the Atlantic islands
The Portuguese who started the settlement of Madeira and the Azores in the early fifteenth century were not intending to abandon Portugal but to create an extension of their homeland in the virgin land of the islands. They belong with earlier generations who had colonised the empty lands and frontier districts of Portugal itself during the era of the reconquista. The greatest attraction for settlers of all classes was the availability of land. As Alberto Vieira put it, ‘the greed for land and titles on the part of second sons and of the lesser aristocracy of the kingdom contributed to feed the diaspora’.38 Land was granted by the captains according to the social status of the applicant, with the result that the largest part of the land was allocated to high-status families, most of whom resided in the islands, intermarried and came to form a close-knit island aristocracy, their social position secured by their economic privileges and by their entailed estates. Alongside these elite families there grew up a class of smallholders who paid tithes to the Order of Christ and dues on mills and wine presses to the captains. In short, this was a reinvention of the rural society of Portugal.
These early migrations and settlements established a pattern that was to characterise the Portuguese diaspora throughout its history. Among those who left Portugal, especially those who went to Cape Verde or the Guinea islands, there were few women—in Vieira’s expressive phrase, ‘the discoveries appear to have to been conjugated in the masculine’.39 For the survival of their communities, female slaves had to be imported to substitute for the Portuguese wives who were not there. To supplement the numbers of those willing to emigrate to the islands, the Crown added degredados whose sentences were commuted to exile, a policy that was to continue in one form or another until the middle of the twentieth century. There were also a large number of settlers who were not subjects of the Crown of Portugal at all. Although replicating the rural society of Portugal in many important respects, the settlement of the islands inevitably involved a higher degree of social mobility than was to be found in Portugal, a tendency that was to characterise Portuguese overseas settlement over the centuries. Another trait visible in the early Portuguese migration within the Atlantic basin was the readiness to settle in lands other than those of the Portuguese Crown, in the Castilian owned Canary Islands or in the Americas, or within African kingdoms on the African mainland.
In the fifteenth century a high degree of mobility was also evident among the population. There was considerable movement of population between the islands, beginning with the leading families themselves. Maciot de Bettencourt, for example, surrendered his claims in the Canaries to the Infante Dom Henrique in return for land in Madeira, while Rui Gonçalves da Camara, second son of the captain of Funchal, obtained the captaincy of São Miguel in the Azores. Some of those who settled in Madeira soon moved on and Vieira has described the island as being ‘a pole of convergence and redistribution of the migratory movement’.40 Information about the population of São Miguel in the Azores in the sixteenth century shows that 59 per cent of families had their origin in Portugal and 24 per cent in Madeira.41 Skilled Madeiran sugar growers also moved to the Canary Islands and to the Cape Verde and Guinea islands where their sugar-making skills were much in demand, the Guinea islands soon outstripping Madeira in the production of sugar.
Alongside sugar production there was commercial movement between the islands and the beginnings of a large-scale slave trade. Already the Portuguese diaspora was forming a complex pattern as the movement of settlers from Portugal and the islands met and merged with the forced diaspora of slaves from Morocco, the Canary Islands and western Africa, creating populations that in their cultural orientation were a blend of both Portuguese and African. Francis Rogers, an American of Azorean origin, describes this mixed heritage of the Atlantic islanders.
In its original efforts to people the Adjacent Islands [Madeira and the Azores] the Portuguese Crown undeniably had recourse not only to foreigners but also to some very unsavoury elements among white Portuguese men, to jailbirds to whom it gave the opportunity of exile in the islands … Blacks, Moors (both Moriscos and captives) baptized Jews (New Christians), Spanish priests, prelates, and others, and mercantile Italians, French, English, and Germans. Slaves were definitely present, Blacks and, to a lesser extent captive Moors; and hanky-panky involving white men and female slaves resulted in the presence of some home grown mestiços.42
This initial phase of the Portuguese diaspora created new bases for further maritime expansion and new centres of population which in time would experience the pressures of over-population and declining agricultural yields and would generate fresh migrations. As the Portuguese diaspora unfolded in the succeeding centuries, it became as much a diaspora of the islanders as of the metropolitan Portuguese.
By the end of the eighteenth century all three groups of islands were experiencing the effects of the imbalance between the needs of a growing peasant population and the concentration of land in the hands of a few landowners. All three island groups also suffered the effects of periodic natural disasters: the diseases which attacked the Madeiran vines, the earthquakes in the Azores and the droughts that afflicted the Cape Verde Islands. The Portuguese Crown had arrived at a solution to these recurring problems—a solution that did not require it to confront the problems of land reform or economic development of the islands. Emigration killed many birds with a single sling shot: poor families were provided with relief, empty lands in Brazil and later in Africa would be colonised, social tensions that periodically led to civil disturbances were eased, and the islanders left behind would benefit from money remitted to their families. So during the reign of João V emigration from the islands to Brazil was encouraged, and in the reign of Salazar two hundred years later emigration to Africa was seen as the state’s best answer to famine and over-population.
The Guinea islands
The last group of islands settled in the fifteenth century were the four Guinea islands—Fernando Po/Bioko, Príncipe, São Tomé and Anobom—discovered by the Portuguese from the 1470s onwards. These volcanic islands lay near the equator and were covered with thick rainforest. Unlike the Cape Verde Islands they did not suffer from lack of rain, but they were situated even farther from Portugal.
Settling in these islands meant almost certainly a permanent separation from Europe and a commitment to living in tropical Africa. Although the islands were reached in the 1470s, few settlers answered the call of the captains to whom the Crown granted the islands of São Tomé, Príncipe and Anobom. The fourth island, Fernando Po, was not settled at all, probably because it was already peopled by Africans and the Portuguese had no desire to undertake the kind of conquest that in the Canaries had proved so difficult. Among the early settlers to Guinea were convicts and, allegedly, Jewish children taken from their parents and sent to help populate the islands. Whatever the truth of this story, the belief that there was a strong Jewish influence in the islands was to persist, so that the islands were bound not only back to Portugal but into the wider world of the Sephardic diaspora.
Once the sugar-growing potential of the islands had been established, the lowland areas in the north of the town of São Tomé were distributed as morgadios to sugar planters. As well as experienced sugar growers from Madeira, the early settlers numbered Genoese, French and Castilians and men ‘of any other nation who want to come to live here and all are accepted with a good will’.43 Sugar prospered and São Tomé became even more commercially successful than Madeira or Ribeira Grande. Seventy ships a year were said to visit the islands by the 1550s to take off the sugar and to bring a wide range of imported goods for the settlers.
The captaincy of São Tomé was abolished in 1522 and the island was placed under a governor and made an episcopal see. The main town was given a Senado da Câmara in 1534, which placed it on the same institutional footing as Lisbon, after Funchal only the second such city outside Portugal. However, European settlers found difficulty in establishing themselves in the islands because of the climate and the disease environment. Large numbers of slaves were imported to work the plantations and to provide wives and concubines for the settlers. Indeed a royal decree specifically allowed the importation of African women for the purpose of ‘populating the island’.44 As a result the Africanisation of the São Tomé population took place even more rapidly than that of Cape Verde. The Portuguese pilot who wrote an account of São Tomé in the middle of the sixteenth century records that ‘when the wife of a merchant dies, he takes a negress, and this is an accepted practice, as the negro population is both intelligent and rich, bringing up their daughters in our way of life, both as regards customs and dress’.45 In the middle of the sixteenth century there were sixty or so sugar mills operating with possibly as many as 10,000 slaves, while the free population of São Tomé probably rose to 600–700 heads of households by the mid sixteenth century before going into decline as sugar production increasingly relocated to Brazil.46
Apart from the transient seamen, merchants and royal governors, the population soon became made up largely of free blacks and mulattos who enjoyed a relative immunity from tropical diseases. By the end of the sixteenth century São Tomé, equipped with the institutions by which metropolitan Portugal governed its territories, presented what Boxer described as ‘a rather peculiar society’. The brothers of the Misericórdia, the town councillors, the cathedral canons, the owners of the sugar plantations and the captains of the militia were all prestigious Portuguese of the local society. But they were all black and the women, as in other creole societies brought into being by the transient maritime Europeans, were a powerful as well as permanently resident influence in this society. There was therefore a marked process of creolisation of their Portuguese identity, because of the imperatives of the climate as well as the presence of so many Africans. The anonymous pilot described a society where the population built wooden houses either on stilts or with an upper floor as protection against insects, adopted African food crops and relied on African remedies for the fevers and venereal diseases which so seriously affected the newcomers. He also describes the social life which brought the settlers to dine in each other’s houses, especially during the periods of great heat.
The islands enjoyed great prosperity until the 1590s when a combination of circumstances led to the decline in sugar production. The plantations began to suffer increasing depredations from bands of maroons (runaway slaves) and the islands were attacked by pirates and by the Dutch. In 1641 the Dutch actually took possession of São Tomé and held it until 1648. By the mid seventeenth century most of the sugar planters had given up the struggle and relocated to Brazil, while São Tomé survived as a tiny community of black Portuguese who made a living from local trade in the Gulf of Guinea and from the visits of the occasional European ship. Príncipe and Anobom, also peopled by black Portuguese, remained under the overall control of their absentee ‘donatary captains’.
Largely cut off from Portugal, the population of the islands developed a rich syncretic creole culture. At least three different creole dialects were spoken in the islands: the Sâo Tomense speech, the speech of the so-called Angolares who were the descendants of the maroons of an earlier age, and the dialect spoken by the tiny community in Anobom. The creole culture found expression in traditional dramatic presentations: the Tchiloli, also called ‘The Tragedy of the Marquis of Mantua’, and the dance drama called dança Congo, Africanised versions of European renaissance theatre of the sixteenth century. These dramas, although of European origin, became an indigenised expression of the creole identities of the population.
Few if any of the islanders had ever been to Portugal and they continually adopted a highly independent stance vis-à-vis the governors and bishops sent by Lisbon—so much so that the Portuguese governors relocated to Príncipe in the eighteenth century to escape their influence. They were nevertheless bound to the metropolis by the invisible threads of rank and status. From Portugal came recognition of their status as town councillors and cathedral canons, confirmation of their land titles and even grants of the habits of knights of the Military Orders. It was the sanction of Lisbon that maintained the social structure of the islands and the status of the free São Tomean families. Moreover, it was as free subjects of the Portuguese Crown that the São Tomeans were able to maintain their security and independence in an Atlantic world where a black skin was often seen as synonymous with slave status. The free black population became known as the forros (freemen) and formed the elite which, after suffering an eclipse during the late colonial period when the island was partitioned among cocoa-producing companies, regained power when São Tomé became independent from Portugal in 1975.
The Guinea islands differed from the other groups in that they never developed migration to the United States. However, there were close ties with Brazil and it was from South America that the cocoa bean was introduced early in the nineteenth century. Networks were also established with Africa. Just as the Cape Verde Islands had become the point of departure for lançados trading and settling along the rivers from Senegal to Sierra Leone, so Portuguese based in São Tomé and Príncipe traded with the African states of the Gulf of Guinea, many of them settling in the Kongo kingdom, Benin or the Itsekiri Kingdom. The Guinea islands thus became a point of departure for a further wave of ‘Portuguese’ emigrants to Africa. However, here the parallels with the other Atlantic islands cease. In the nineteenth century large numbers of emigrants left Madeira, the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands for the New World. By contrast São Tomé became a destination for immigrants. Thousands of labourers were forcibly contracted in Africa for work on the cocoa plantations and Cape Verdeans driven by famine to leave their islands were also contracted to work in São Tomé. When considering the economics of labour and the forces that control the flow of migrants, the Guinea islands have to be placed in the same category as the islands of the Caribbean.