The Portuguese in the United States

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Link of interest about the Portuguese in the United States:

lcweb.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/portam/index.html

lcweb.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/portam/img/vasco2.jpg

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Portuguese-American Timeline 1500s, 1600s

1492
A Portuguese man, whose name in Spanish was Juan Arias and who was said to have come from "Tavaria," was among Columbus' crew on his voyage of discovery. His name in Portuguese was most likely João Aires, and there is a town in Portugal called Tavira, located near Palos, out of which Columbus sailed in 1492. On the return trip in 1493 Columbus stopped in Santa Maria, Azores on February 13 and in Lisbon on March 4, and the Portuguese were thus the first Europeans to hear reports of the outcome of the journey. Columbus relied heavily on Portuguese expertise, including papers and charts of his Portuguese father-in-law.

1494
The Treaty of Tordesilhas was signed on June 7. The previous year Pope Alexander VI had declared that Portugal was entitled to lands east of a line drawn 100 leagues west of the Azores and Cape Verde and that Spain was entitled to the lands lying west of that line. The Portuguese were unwilling to accept this demarcation, and the treaty set the line at some 370 leagues from Cape Verde. Pope Julius II did not confirm the treaty until January 24, 1506.

1500s
The Portuguese fished heavily on the Grand Banks and the Newfoundland area throughout the first decades of the sixteenth century.

1500
Pedro Álvares Cabral, attempting to reach India via the Cape of Good Hope, landed in present-day Porto Seguro, Bahia, Brazil and claimed the land for the Crown of Portugal.

1524
Estêvão Gomes of Oporto, previously the chief pilot for Magalhães (commonly known as Magellan), set out from La Coruña in September, having been commissioned by Charles V, the emperor of Spain, the previous year to locate a northwest passage leading from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Reaching North America in February of 1525, he entered the Gulf of St. Lawrence despite the weather. Gomes sighted Prince Edward Island and discovered the Gut of Canso. He followed the Nova Scotia and Maine coasts and sailed the Penobscot in search of a strait that could lead him to the Moluccas. It is probable that he reached Cape Cod in July of 1525, and he was back in Spain in August.

1539
Among the 600 men who landed near Tampa Bay, Florida with the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto were at least 100 Portuguese. The expedition traversed a great deal of territory, seeing parts of present-day Georgia, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. Just under three years after landing, on May 21, 1542, De Soto died on the banks of the Mississippi. The survivors continued on to present-day Texas. Among the explorers was a nobleman from Elvas, Portugal, André de Vasconcelos da Silva, who seems to have been the leader of the Elvas group. He never returned home. The oldest description of these lands is from this expedition. Written in Portuguese by an anonymous Fidalgo de Elvas, or Gentleman of Elvas, it was published in 1557.

1542
While in the service of the King of Spain, João Rodrigues Cabrilho (also known by his name in Spanish, Cabrillo) led the first Europeans to enter California as he and his crew sailed into San Diego harbor. Cabrilho reached Drake's Bay on November 14, named Cape Mendocino after the Viceroy of Mexico, and died on January 3, 1543, on San Miguel Island, near Santa Barbara. A monument to Cabrilho was erected in Oakland, California in the 1920s, and on January 3, 1937, the anniversary of Cabrilho's death, another monument, this one erected on the island where he died, was unveiled by San Francisco's Cabrillo Civic Club. A statue of the explorer, sculpted by Álvaro de Bré, was on display in the Portuguese pavilion of the 1939 World's Fair in New York. The Portuguese minister of information, António Ferro, promised to donate it to California, and a controversy followed as to where it should be placed. It was eventually placed on Point Loma, located in San Diego, and it is owned and maintained by the National Park Service.

1545
The first person to take tobacco to Europe from America was Luís Góis, a Portuguese man. Some was sent to France by Jean Nicot, ambassador to the Court of Lisbon. Catherine de Medici is said to have suffered from an acute addiction to the substance, and the word "nicotine" comes from the ambassador's name.

1555
There are those who believe that João Caetano, a Portuguese in the service of Spain, came to the Hawaiian Islands. However, most historians record the official discovery of the islands to be the one by Captain John Cook in 1778.

1572
Os Lusíadas, the epic poem by the great Portuguese writer Luís de Camões, first appeared in Lisbon. Camões is inscribed on a wall of the Hispanic Division Reading Room in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress and on the Boston Public Library's Dartmouth Street façade.

1584
A native of the Azores, Simão Fernandes piloted the British colonies to America. In 1584 he went to Virginia as Sir Walter Raleigh's master pilot, and in 1585 he discovered Port Simon, in Virginia.

1593
Portuguese soldiers, sent from Lisbon by order of Phillip II, composed the first garrison of the San Felipe del Morro fortress in Puerto Rico. Some brought their wives, while others married Puerto Rican women, and today there are many Puerto Rican families with Portuguese last names.

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Portuguese-American timeline 1600-1750

1600
Portuguese navigator Pedro de Teixeira reached the coast of California north of Cape Mendocino.

1634
The first documented Portuguese settler in the present-day United States, Mathias de Sousa, arrived in Maryland. Some believe that he was of Jewish descent.

1642
On October 3, a Franciscan convent for men was founded in Puerto Rico by Portuguese friars who had come to the island in 1641.

1654
On January 26, a group of 23 Portuguese Sephardic Jews, who had originally fled from Portugal to the Netherlands, left Recife in Pernambuco, Brazil for New Amsterdam (now Manhattan, New York City) in the wake of the collapse of the Dutch colony in that South American country. These refugees were the founders of the first American Jewish community. During its first decades, the Congregation Shearith Israel (since renamed the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue) used the Portuguese language. By the middle of the 1700s, however, both Portuguese and Spanish had given way to English.

1658-77
Groups of Portuguese and Spanish Jews from Barbados settled in Newport, Rhode Island. Other Jewish settlers arrived from Curaçao, Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands.

1658
A group of Portuguese Jews founded the Sephardim Touro Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. Jewish Portuguese families introduced the Masonic order to Newport. The synagogue was dedicated five years later, making it the first synagogue in the United States.

1700-70
The principal source of the wine drunk in the Thirteen Colonies and the West Indies was the archipelago of Madeira, which in turn received much Pennsylvania grain and New England cod.

1727-76
The oath of allegiance to the British crown was administered in Pennsylvania to German, Dutch, Portuguese, French, and Swiss citizens.

1730
Isaac Mendes Seixas arrived in New York from Portugal. His son, Benjamin Mendes Seixas of Newport and later New York, became one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange.

1732
A group of Portuguese and Spanish Jews arrived in Savannah, Georgia via England.

1734
Rabbi David Mendes Machado, originally from Lisbon, became the rabbi of the Spanish-Portuguese congregation Searith Israel in New York City.

1737
Abraham de Lyon, a Jewish Portuguese winegrower, settled in Georgia and began planting vineyards. He is said to have introduced the process into Georgia.

c. 1750
Shipwrecked Portuguese sailors are said to have arrived on the coast of Georgetown, South Carolina and to have married into the Amerindian and Afro-American communities.

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Portuguese-American timeline 1750-1850

1755
A group of Portuguese Jews arrived in Narragansett, Rhode Island from Lisbon after a devastating earthquake in the Portuguese capital. The earthquake destroyed a large portion of Portuguese official documents, including many related to the discoveries.

1761
James Lucena received permission from the General Assembly of Rhode Island to manufacture Castile soap.

1763
The Touro Synagogue in Newport (the first synagogue in the United States) was dedicated on December 2. Among the founders was Aaron Lopez (or Lopes) of Lisbon. He did not openly profess Judaism until arriving in Rhode Island, where he took the name Aaron. Besides participating in the founding of the synagogue, Lopez was instrumental in building up the whaling industry and he employed Azorean seamen on his approximately thirty ships.

1770s
Pap estimates that there were several hundred Christian Portuguese in the colonies and many other Jewish Portuguese by the time of the Revolutionary War.
Peter Francisco fought in the Revolutionary War in the northern battles of Brandywine, Germantown, Montmouth, and Stony Point. Later he lived in Virginia, at Locust Grove, from 1794 to the 1820s, and he died in 1831. Francisco was sergeant-at-arms in the Virginia House of Delegates. In 1974 the Portuguese Continental Union of the United States of America began bestowing a "Peter Francisco Award" upon distinguished Americans who have contributed to the Portuguese cause. Francisco, who was abandoned as a small boy on a wharf in Virginia, speaking very little English, is believed to have been Portuguese.
A number of Portuguese fought in the Revolutionary War, including Jacob and Solomon Pinto, Jewish brothers who settled in New Haven in the 1750s. About fifteen percent of the enlisted personnel on board the first warship to fly the Stars and Stripes, the Bonhomme Richard, captained by John Paul Jones, were Portuguese.
Other examples include Joseph Dias or José Diaz, probably from the Azores, who came to Martha's Vineyard in 1770. After marrying a local woman in 1780, he joined the revolutionary forces and was captured by the British. Sent as a prisoner to England, he was released shortly and was back home before the end of the year. In December 1780 he was baptized into the Baptist church. He was captured a second time and in 1781 died a prisoner on the Jersey.

1780
Antão de Almada, the governor of the Azores, stated in a report that groups of men from the Azores became crew members of about 200 whaling ships. Many of these men eventually came to America. When whaling was still a common activity, hiding or working on ships headed for the United States was one of the most common ways for Portuguese boys and men to make their way here from the Azores.

1789-1815
Portuguese settlers founded whaling stations for processing oil along the California coast at Carmel, Half Moon Bay, Monterey, Pescadero, Point Conception, Portuguese Bend, Portuguese Cove, San Diego, and San Simeon.

1790
A part of the Pacific coast south of Alaska was discovered by the Portuguese navigator Salvador Fidalgo.
A number of Portuguese names (some modified slightly) were reported in the first U.S. census. In New York City and County, these included Farrara, Gomez, Navarro, Pinto, Seixas, Seixias, and Silver. In Charleston District, South Carolina, De Costa and Lopus could be found. Philadephia had Facundus and Telles, and there was a Rozario in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Moisés Seixas, born in 1744, wrote a congratulatory address to George Washington in which he coined the phrase "to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." Seixas was an influential Portuguese Jewish leader and a Grand Master of the Masonic order, as well as a cashier at the Bank of Rhode Island. He died in 1809.

1794
Portuguese nationals were already residing on the Hawaiian or Sandwich Islands.

1803
After the Louisiana Purchase, some Portuguese moved to the vicinity of New Orleans. Later, in 1815, many Portuguese sailors and gunners were aboard the pirate leader Jean Lafitte's ship in the Battle of New Orleans, fighting on the American side against the British.

1812
Along with the Portuguese Jews who came to New York in the seventeenth century, there was a small colony of Portuguese Christians in New York City by the War of 1812.
At least three Portuguese fought on American ships in the Battle of Lake Erie.

1814
Portuguese adventurer John Elliot de Castro arrived in Hawaii. King Kamehameha I took a liking to him, and Castro received lands from the king and served as his physician. Castro left Hawaii and, after adventures that included being captured by the Spanish, he returned in 1816 and served as secretary or foreign minister to the king.

c. 1815
António José Rocha, the first documented Portuguese settler in California, arrived in present-day Los Angeles and set up a blacksmith shop. By 1828 he owned La Brea Rancho, where the La Brea Tar Pits are now located. The ranch, which he obtained with the assistance of his Mexican brother-in-law, had 4,600 acres. Rocha built a mill at Mission San Gabriel, as well as a house that in 1853 became the L.A. city hall and county courthouse. He also established whaling stations, some of the earliest in California.

1816
The French Catholic Sulpician priest Peter Babad (1763-1846) began teaching Portuguese at St. Mary's College in Baltimore.

1820-1870
According to the U.S. census 5,272 people, not necessarily immigrants, arrived from Portugal during this period.

1826
Jacinto Pereira, also known as Jason Perry, was born in Faial, Azores, on April 15, 1826; he died in Hawaii on March 27, 1883. Pereira was the owner of a dry goods store in Honolulu and a leader of the Portuguese community there. He served as a consular agent on the islands and helped recruit workers from Madeira to come to Hawaii.

1828
According to local lore, António Silva, who arrived in Hawaii in 1828, was the one to introduce sugar cultivation to the islands.

c. 1830
Commercial relations between New Bedford, Massachusetts and the Azores were in full swing about this time. The first Azorean family to stay in New Bedford settled there about ten years later.

1830-1879
Approximately 400 people from Cape Verde and the Azores, deserters from whaling ships, lived in the Hawaiian Islands.

1831
Sicilian Pietro Bachi, who taught Portuguese at Harvard College from 1826 to 1846, published a Portuguese grammar, the second such work to appear in the United States.

1833
Mexican authorities ordered the secularization of missions, leading to their decline.

1837
There was a Portuguese vice-consulate in Boston.

1839
The first Portuguese sailors started coming to Providence, Rhode Island. A few decades later settlement in substantial numbers began.

c. 1840
Several hundred Portuguese nationals were recruited from the Azores to work on sugar plantations in Louisiana. Many of these immigrants married Creole women and remained on the plantations until the Civil War. In 1847 they founded the first Portuguese mutual aid society in the United States, the Portuguese Benevolent Association. A second society, the Lusitanian Benevolent Association, was founded in 1848 after a quarrel split the original association. Three years later the two merged and took the name Lusitanian-Portuguese Benevolent Association. Some of these settlers fought in the Confederate Army, and after the Civil War, many left for California, while some are reported to have returned to Portugal.

1845-47
The first group of Azoreans came to Gloucester, Massachusetts, a fishing community on Cape Ann.

1846
The United States took control of Mexican lands that included California. There were Portuguese natives living or conducting business there, engaged primarily in the whaling industry.

1849
Numerous Portuguese and Azoreans took part in the California Gold Rush, leading to an increase in the Portuguese presence in California. In 1850 there were 150 Portuguese there, and in 1860 there were already about 1,560. Some had been attracted to the area by an eighteen-page booklet printed in Porto about California and the gold mines.
Approximately 1,000 Madeiran Protestants moved to the British island of Trinidad for religious reasons in 1846. Three years later they were assisted by residents of the Springfield, Illinois area in relocating to Illinois, and the group was solidified by 1855; in total about 400 moved to Illinois.

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Portuguese-American timeline 1850-1875

1851
Five Portuguese became naturalized Hawaiians in 1851. To that date, 37 Portuguese had done the same. These numbers continued to rise for more than a decade.

1853
Captain António Mendes, native of the Azorean island of Terceira, arrived in San Francisco. Aside from reputedly being the first person to navigate the Sacramento River, he was a miner and a farmer in California.
This year marked the recording of Provincetown, Rhode Island's first Portuguese-American birth.
winter of 1853-54
Painter and photographer Solomon Nunes Carvalho of Charleston, South Carolina joined explorer John C. Frémont on his search through Kansas, Colorado, and Utah for a railroad route to the Pacific. His portrait is part of American Memory's America's First Look into the Camera.

1854
The Monterey Whaling Company, was started in 1854, three years after whaling began in Monterey, California, and reorganized the following year, with two boats and seventeen Portuguese seamen. It would later, in 1873, be merged with another whaling company and come to comprise twenty-three whalemen.

1855
Antone S. Sylvia, of the Azores, arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He eventually became the sole proprietor of the Joseph Frazer Whaling Outfitting Company, based in New Bedford, and a millionaire.
The first Portuguese in Fall River, Massachusetts is said to have arrived in 1855.

c. 1855
Tionio da Rosa, also known as Tionio Waters, came from Faial, Azores to Sacramento, California and was one of the first pioneers of that area.

1856
Mrs. Maria de Jesus Cunha (also known as Wager), along with a number of sons and daughters, arrived in Fall River, Massachusetts, which has since become one of the largest and most important Portuguese-American communities.

1858
William M. Wood was born in Martha's Vineyard of a Yankee mother and Portuguese father. Raised in New Bedford, Wood founded and headed the successful American Woolen Company.

1859
The discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania caused the American whaling industry to begin to decline.

1860s
The process of canning, first of salmon, and later of sardines, tuna, and other fish, was introduced, changing the fishing industry in California. Azoreans were involved in the canned fish industry by the 1880s.

1860
The Portuguese in California could be found mostly on the Central Coast and in the Sierra Mountains. There were more than 800 Portuguese miners in California.
1861-70
According to the 1870 U.S. census, 2,658 Portuguese entered the country during this decade.

1861
António S. Silva was a pioneer settler of San Leandro, California, where many Portuguese eventually settled. Oakes Boulevard was named after his family, whose members have borne the names Oakes and Carvalho, which means "oak." Many Portuguese names were Anglicized in this way or suffered spelling or pronunciation modifications.

1862
Two Portuguese are listed on the Massachusetts Honor Roll as having died for the Union in 1862: Elisha N. Ávila died on February 14 at Fort Donaldson and Antone Frates (or Freitas) was killed in action on June 2.
Azoreans and Madeirans from Monterey, California founded the whaling station at Carmel.

1863
Carlos I, King of Portugal, was born in 1863 and died in 1908.

1864
Maria Loriana Cunha, thought to have been the first Portuguese woman to arrive in Hawaii, was issued a passport in Horta, Azores.

1866
John Phillips or Phillipe, born João or Manuel Felipe, became a hero, riding 240 miles in freezing snow and through hostile territory, when a fort that was being built on the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming was attacked and he volunteered to call for help at the next fort. He was known as "Portuguese John."
In Boston, the Sociedade Portugueza de Beneficencia de Massachusetts, the second Portuguese mutual-aid society in the United States, came into being. Another, competing society, the Sociedade de Beneficencia, Instrução e Recreio União Luisitana was founded in 1871, and it had its own band.
The first Catholic priest who came to the United States from Portugal for the benefit of an immigrant community arrived in New Bedford.

1868
In San Francisco, the Associação Portuguesa de Beneficiencia de Califórnia, formed by Azoreans, came into being. Within days a second group was formed and named Associação Protectiva. In 1871 the two came together to form the Portuguese Protective and Benevolent Association of the City and County of San Francisco, or the Associação Portuguesa Protectora e Beneficente do Estado da Califórnia (A.P.P.B.). It came to be influential in local affairs and to have a large membership, many affiliates (or councils), and halls in a number of towns.

1870s
Roughly one quarter of the children in schools in Provincetown, Massachusetts were Portuguese.
By this decade, the Portuguese in San Leandro, California were observing the Pentecostal Festa do Espírito Santo (Festival of the Holy Ghost). The festival is typical of Portuguese-American and Azorean, but not Continental Portuguese, communities. Eighty percent of the Portuguese who arrived in the 1870s came to the West Coast.

c. 1870
In California, the Portuguese turned increasingly to dairying. About 27 percent of the Portuguese in the United States resided in California, while almost all of the rest were in New England. A decade later more than half would be in California.

1871-80
The Portuguese presence in the United States picked up dramatically: in the period 1820-70, according to the U.S. census, 5,272 people (not necessarily immigrants) arrived from Portugal, while the figure for 1871-80 is 14,082. Each decade through 1920 immigration continued to increase. Although these figures can be used to demonstrate trends, Azoreans and Cape Verdeans were not always counted among the Portuguese, and the figures do not provide information on U.S.-born citizens of Portuguese descent. For this and other reasons, such as the volume of clandestine departures from Portugal and its territories and/or illegal entries into the United States, as well as the misclassification of Portuguese immigrants as Spanish, reliable data for quantifying the Portuguese presence in the United States are by far the exception, not the rule.

1871
The American whaling industry was in such a state of decline that an entire New Bedford whaling fleet was abandoned in the ice of the Arctic Ocean.

1872
A second attempt at attracting Portuguese laborers to Louisiana was made. About 230 Portuguese, of whom approximately 80 were children, landed in New Orleans and were supposed to work along the Latourche River on plantations. However, work conditions were so poor that many or possibly even all of them left the plantations to work in New Orleans or sail for Cuba.

1874
The first of many Portuguese parishes in Fall River, Massachusetts began as a mission in 1874 and became a parish in 1892. The mission, which grew to be the Santo Christo Parish, was started by Rev. António de Mattos Freitas of São Jorge, Azores.
In Erie, Pennsylvania, the Sociedade Portuguesa da Santíssima Trindade (Portuguese Society of the Most Blessed Trinity) came into being. According to Cardozo it was founded by twenty-five Azoreans; Pap, on the other hand, claims it was formed by two dozen Madeiran families.
At Half Moon Bay in California the Holy Ghost festival was celebrated, begun by a woman from Corvo by the name of Rosa Pedro. According to Pap, this appears to be the first such festival in the United States.

1875
St. John's Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts was dedicated this year. The parish, which was canonically instituted in 1871, was the second Portuguese parish in New Bedford, after St. Mary's.
In this year, 400 Portuguese, a large number of whom formerly served as seamen on whaling vessels, resided in Hawaii.

[unknown]

The Portuguese in America are a backwards, uneducated, impoverished lot of meds. They have proven themselves to be unopen to assimiliation, insular and great consumers AND producers of pornographic material. WASP New Englanders consider Portuguese 'Americans' lower than african americans, and there is indeed a reason for this. While the african americans are the most criminal and stupid element in american society, they are not a silent people. They are everywhere in the media, their rap culture imitated by millions of suburbanites worldwide, their food greatly appreciated etc.. But the portuguese americans are very silent, neither their music, food, culture or language appreciated by ANYONE (no my big fat portuguese wedding for example), largely because as I've mentioned there are no portuguese in positions of power (no media execs, politicians etc..) I feel sorry for them, at least rednecks can point out that while they themselves have not accomplished anything their racial brethren in other parts of the US have, that the majority culture in the US (currently) is Anglo-Saxon, but the ports cannot point out to anything about modern america and say "we have done this, this is our contribution'. In New England similiar things can be said about the frog-canadians, in NE the most powerful groups are Italians and WASPS and the lowest most worthless groups are portuguese and french. Not all meds are created equal.

[Afro]

^^^

This man is a complete idiot and I'm glad he has been banned.

[Vimara]

that guy was funny!! i wish he wasnt banned. hahaha

[AWAR]

Actually, I've banned him for something else. Only now do I see this