Of the immigrants to the United States from Catholic European countries and French Canada, the Portuguese are numerically relatively few. In several significant ways, however, they are unique. Portuguese-Americans are in one sense very unified, and in another very divided. Traditionally they are intensely conscious of their national-origins--"We're proud of being Portuguese," they proclaim--and at the same time catholic with both a capital and a small c, proud of their university and belief in "one holy catholic and apostolic Church."
A glance at the earliest Portuguese immigrants to America reveals them as Continentals, Azoreans, Madeirans, or Cape Verdeans. Among later "Portuguese" are Brazilians, Goans, Macaenses, and Angolans (white descendants born in Angola of European Portuguese administrators and others). They express their uniqueness in a strong sense of an original national identity and heritage, coupled with the paradox of their very real diversity and resultant lack of unity, with a concomitant reluctance to cooperate. Their divisions extend even to different island origins within the same archipelago. Thus, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, there are many Faialenses from the central Azorean island of Fayal, and in nearby Fall River, Massachusetts, live numerous Micaelenses from the eastern Azorean island of Sao Miguel. The two groups are rivals.
The Early Immigrant Wave
While few Portuguese immigrated to the United States in the eighteenth century, the main flow began in the early nineteenth. It was originated by Yankee whalers that first called, outward bound, at the city of Horta on Fayal, in the "Western Islands (Azores)," then at the islands of Fogo and, chiefly, Brava, in the "Cape de Verdes," Melville in his Moby Dick of 1851 said it all:
As for the residue of the Pequod's company, be it said that
at the present day not one in two of the many thousand men
before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are
Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are.
Herein it is the same with the American whale fishery as
with the American army and military and merchant navies,
and the engineering forces employed in the construction of
the American Canals and Railroads. The same, I say,
because in all these cases the native American liberally
provides the brains, the rest of the world as generously
supplying the muscles. No small number of these whaling
seamen belong to the Azores, where the outward bound
Nantucket whalers frequently touch to augment their crews
from the hardy peasant of those rocky shores. . . .How it
is, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the
best whalemen. They were nearly all Islanders in the
Pequod. . .
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