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Only six big schooners are left amongst the fleet that will leave Lisbon next month for a half a year of salt fishing on the Newfoundland and Greenland banks, after old Mister Cod in the ancient way, hooked and hauled on the longlines by the man in the dory, out there on his own, the man who made Gloucester great.
What a race of men are these Portuguese! What seafarers! What explorers! What fisherman! How many Gloucester people today, even of Portuguese descent have any but a vague idea of what these mighty mariners and their sons and daughters have given to this old city, its industry, its color, its traditions, its culture?
The first Portuguese of record to settle is said to have been Francis Bernhard, who came here around 1846 from St. Michaels in the Azores by way of a New Bedford whaler. In 1849 he married Lydia Havey of Canso, Nova Scotia, thereby joining together two of our proudest strains.
Emigration was given urgency in 1853 when a fungus ruined the Azorean vineyards, and by 1860 there were around twenty-five families from the islands here, settling on the rise of land that came to be known as Portugee Hill. In 1880 about 250 were fishing out of Gloucester. Not for another twenty years did immigration from continental Portugal commence on a substantial scale. Thirty years ago the Portuguese numbered roughly 2,000 here, but I'm afraid many of the pioneering spirits have left to seek greener grounds in areas like the West Coast, and it is our loss.
The first generation kept pretty much to themselves, especially the women, who spoke English with difficulty and mingled rarely with the natives. They formed their own colony, as the Sicilians did later in the Fort, because they were strangers in a new land and could in this way preserve their culture and customs, and their identity, and because they were subjected in this largely Anglo-Saxon community to prejudice, disdain and exploitation.
But the superb qualities of the Portuguese fisherman were bound to prevail. Who can forget the magnificent, poignant portrait of Manuel in Captains Courageous, the best story ever written about Gloucester, and at that by an Englishman, Rudyard Kipling?
By the 1890s many of the first-generation Portuguese had risen to skipper, and a few were owners. Nor is it surprising that these deepwater men favored the most dangerous, most productive, Georges Bank fishery. Among them was the fabled Captain Joseph P. Mesquita, immigrant from the Azores, hard-driving high liner, one of the smartest skippers ever to pile on canvas out of Gloucester. His given name was Joseph Perry, but there were so many Perrys when he immigrated that he substituted his nickname "Mesquita" and only retained the initial P. So his namesake grandson explained it to me.
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It was "Smoky Joe" who introduced the Portuguese religious ceremony of the Festival of the Crowning in 1902, consummating the vow of gratitude he made after he and his crew were plucked from the fog-shrouded waters of Georges when their schooner Mary Mesquita was rammed and sent to the bottom by the Cunard Liner Saxonian.
Legion are the yarns about Smoky Joe. The late Everett Jodrey, who was largely responsible for getting the Jodrey State Fish Pier built in Gloucester sixty years ago, told me one that goes something like this:
Captain Mesquita and his gang (as they called the crews) were fishing the Grand Bank in the thick o'fog when out of the soup loomed a great black freighter and with a jangle of bells drifted to a stop.
"Can you give us your position?" her master yelled through his megaphone down from the grand height of his bridge, somewhat sheepishly.
"What! Ya got all dat dam gear up dare, an' dem compass, an' sextant, an' Marconi, and yer running rounda goddam ocean, an' yer don' know whare yer at? Hold on dare one minnid."
Smoky Joe told a man to heave the armed lead and take a sounding. Down it plopped, and up it came, and he squinted at the mud stuck to the tallow and rubbed it tween his fingers and tasted it, muttering all the while "dam fool, dam fool." He checked the current and then broke out the chart and eyed it for a moment.
"Here yar, Mister!" he boomed up at the man in the brass and the braid. And he called out the latitude and the longitude, did Captain Joe Mesquita, and gave the freighter a course in the bargain.
And when the fog scaled up, and that book-learned master was able to shoot the sun with his sextant, he found that an old Portugee who couldn't write his name had located his great ship in the middle of the ocean within a half a mile of his true position, using nothing but a lead and that sixth sense that the big men seem to have. So all hail the Portuguese who are fishing the Grand Bank now, and were when the Indians roamed Cape Ann.
March 29, 1968
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