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Books Africans Europeans The
Portuguese The Portuguese
immigrants to Trinidad were the first to come to
the West Indies and were drawn from the Portuguese
Atlantic provinces of the Azores, Madeira and the
Cape Verde Islands during the nineteenth century.
There was also a group of Portuguese in the island
as early as 1630 and Sephardim (Portuguese and
Spanish Jews) were in Trinidad in the eighteenth
century and some may have been numbered among the
nineteenth century immigrants. By far the largest
group of Portuguese, however, hailed from the
Madeira Islands, a small archipelago situated off
the west coast of Morocco. Madeirans or
Madeirenses, who originally came to work on
the cocoa and sugar estates under the scheme of
indentureship, constituted the main body of
ancestors of Trinidad's small Portuguese
community. In 1834, the year
of the abolition of slavery (some four years prior
to the full emancipation of the slaves), the first
Portuguese entered Trinidad, not from Madeira, but
from the Azores. At that time, planters were
approaching a crisis situation as the need to
locate other sources of regular labour was becoming
more and more pressing since slavery was about to
come to an end. Aware of the profits to be made at
the expense of the increasingly desperate planters,
a group of men who manned slave ships illegally
solicited twenty-five Portuguese labourers from the
island of Faial (or Fayal) in the Azores. Within
less than two years, these labourers either died
due to extreme weakness and illness or returned to
the Azores because of difficult living and working
conditions, leaving no trace behind. Legitimate
measures were put into place to facilitate
immigration by 1838. Planters first commissioned
free black labour from the United States, several
Eastern Caribbean islands and later West Africa but
after these attempts failed, they turned to
European labour. Labourers from France and Germany,
among other European countries, were attracted by
the purportedly high wages on the sugar estates,
but this bid too met with little
success. In the early
nineteenth century, Madeira found itself in great
economic and social upheaval. The Madeiran wine
industry, the anchor of the islands economy, began
to experience a decline. Natural disasters led to
famine, neglected vineyards and widespread
unemployment. These factors as well as overcrowding
led to a reduced standard of living and for many,
emigration was a matter of survival. The troubled
situation was further intensified by religious
tension that arose due to the emergence of a group
of recent Presbyterian converts in traditionally
Roman Catholic Madeira. Two waves of
Madeirans, therefore, came to Trinidad in 1846 and
onwards for very different reasons. In a sense,
both groups were refugees - one made up of mainly
rural folk fleeing severe economic disaster, and
the other comprising largely educated urban
dwellers fleeing violent religious
persecution. In the 1830s,
Madeirans had already begun to emigrate in droves
to Demerara (or British Guiana) and planters and
estate labourers alike found this venture
successful and mutually beneficial. When
Trinidadian cocoa planters requested urgent help
from the Governor for their estates, the
governments of England and Portugal agreed to allow
Madeiran immigration to Trinidad as they recognised
the relative success of the British Guianese
experiment (despite an initially high mortality
rate) and the probability that Madeiran peasants,
who were used to viticulture and sugar cane
cultivation, would prove to be suitable for the
cocoa plantations. Sugar planters,
however, privately chartered the Senator,
the first barque with 219 Madeiran immigrant
labourers. They arrived in Trinidad on 9th of May
1846, eleven years after the arrival of the Faial
Portuguese, and were put to work on the more
rigorous but better-paying sugar estates, contrary
to original government stipulations. The harsh
conditions of tropical sugar plantations proved to
be too much for the Portuguese. Deaths were not
infrequent and some left for the cocoa estates
while others abandoned plantation labour altogether
and turned to petty shop-keeping. Other ships
arrived later in 1846 and in 1847. The Portuguese
were not compelled by law to indenture themselves
and Madeira did not prove to be a viable source of
labour. After 1847, Portuguese immigration was no
longer considered a solution to the planters'
predicament and the Madeirans were followed by two
groups of Asian indentured labourers: the Chinese
and the Indians. The Protestant
converts, led by Dr. Robert Reid Kalley, a medical
missionary of the Free Church of Scotland,
encountered a great deal of hostility and
intolerance in Roman Catholic Madeira and were
eventually forced to seek asylum abroad. The first
group of 197 refugees sailed on the barque
William into Trinidad on 16th of September
1846, just four months after the arrival of the
first Madeiran immigrants. In Trinidad, where
freedom of worship and religious tolerance were
decreed in the final year of the reign of George
III, they were welcomed by the already established
but small Church of Scotland, but were again
brought face to face with their countrymen who
harboured the very same prejudices that the
refugees had sought to escape in their flight from
Madeira. Like their
impoverished Catholic compatriots who came to
better their fortunes, many of the Presbyterian
refugees arrived in Trinidad destitute. After some
initial difficulty in finding employment, some
being forced to indenture themselves to the
estates, they too managed to embark on small-scale
entrepreneurship. The first Portuguese shop (the
ownership of which is uncertain) opened in 1846,
the year of the arrival of both Catholic immigrants
and Protestant refugees. In general, it seems that
the Protestants opened the better dry goods stores,
mainly in Port-of-Spain and Arouca (where there was
another Scottish Presbyterian community), while the
Catholics found work on the estates as shop
managers and opened the typical rum shops and
adjoining shops or groceries, dispersed all over
the island. Established Portuguese shop owners
readily hired newly arrived Madeirans, who could
speak no English and therefore could not easily
secure jobs elsewhere, as shop clerks, and joint
Portuguese ownership of rum shops was not uncommon.
Several Portuguese were also employed as gardeners
and housekeepers and the community gained a
reputation for being industrious and
enterprising. After being
accommodated by the Scottish community of
Greyfriars Church on Frederick Street in
Port-of-Spain, the refugees built their own church
in 1854 under the leadership of Reverend Henrique
Vieira. It was named the St. Ann's Church of
Scotland (because of its location on the corner of
St. Ann's Road, now Charlotte Street, and Oxford
Street) but was once more commonly identified as
the Portuguese Church. The Portuguese language and
Portuguese Bibles and hymnals were in regular use
up to twenty-seven years after the arrival of the
first refugees and Scottish ministers even
endeavoured to learn Portuguese before taking up a
term of office at St. Ann's in order to effectively
minister to the largely Lusophone congregation. The
very religious Catholic Portuguese, with their love
of and strong adherence to their festas
(feast days), especially that of their patron saint
Nossa Senhora do Monte (Our Lady of the
Mount), jeeringly referred to the Presbyterian
Portuguese as "Kalleyistas" or
"Calvinistas". Relations between these two
denominations were so strained at the outset that
intermarriage as well as business relationships
were not only frowned upon but often strictly
forbidden by both factions. After the first
two waves of Madeiran Portuguese in 1846, Catholic
Madeirans continued to emigrate in trickles well
after the end of the nineteenth century and by the
turn of the twentieth, it was estimated that the
entire Portuguese community was some two thousand
strong. Although emigration was no longer
necessitated by economic woes and misfortunes,
Madeirans continued to migrate voluntarily to
Trinidad to seek improved living conditions and
stories are told of immigrants who travelled as
stowaways on the long journey from Madeira to
Trinidad. Family emigration was not unusual and
Madeirans often emigrated to join family members
who had settled in Trinidad before them, sometimes
accompanied by cherished family
servants. At this point, it
is worth mentioning that emigration from the Cape
Verde Islands was allowed by the local authorities,
because of a critical food shortage there in 1856,
and was welcomed by West Indian planters. Less than
a hundred immigrants reached Trinidad, immigration
having ceased by 1858, and the emigrants seem to
have been of Negroid origin rather than
Caucasian. By the last
decade of the nineteenth century, the Presbyterian
Portuguese community, which had once numbered well
over one thousand, had dwindled greatly as close to
two-thirds of them chose to emigrate to Brazil and
the United States, where other Portuguese
Protestant communities were thriving, leaving
behind just a few hundred who opted to remain in
Trinidad. With the passage of time and a weakened
Portuguese Presbyterian community, a breakdown of
religious barriers through contact in the social,
business and educational arenas resulted in several
mixed marriages. The two groups eventually merged,
so undeniably strong were their ancestral, cultural
and linguistic bonds, and the outnumbered
Presbyterians became absorbed by the wider Roman
Catholic community, comprising not just Portuguese
but French, Spanish, Irish and English
settlers. Now, no longer
distinct as an ethnic group, the Portuguese Creoles
have been completely assimilated into the wider
society. Their forebears must have formed a curious
sight on disembarking in Port-of-Spain, some of the
men bedecked in their workman's woolly caps with
pom-poms and earflaps and their traditional island
footwear of plain knee-high boots worn rolled down
to the ankle. They became well-known for their rum
shops and retail groceries, which later gave way to
larger scale commercial enterprises, for their
predilection for salted cod, soups, their liberal
use of olive oil and for the garlic pork ("carne
de vinho e de alhos1" or
"calvinadage", to give it its evolved local
pronunciation) prepared at Christmas time, which
has become virtually the only lasting symbol of
Trinidadian Portuguese ethnicity. Their love of
music and dancing is as much Trinidadian as it is
Portuguese and their two clubs in Port-of-Spain, A
Associação Portuguesa Primeiro de
Dezembro and The Portuguese Club, stand as silent
testimony to a formerly vibrant and close-knit
Portuguese community. Little else is
left to recall the presence of the Portuguese in
Trinidad, with the exception of a preponderance of
surnames which continue to adorn business places,
dot the pages of the nation's history and which are
borne by their descendants whether they
full-blooded Portuguese or not. Names like Camacho,
Coelho, Correia, Fernandes, Pereira, Querino,
Ribeiro and Sá Gomes are not only among the
more notable in the business sector past and
present, but speak of the Portuguese community's
bewilderingly rapid yet unheralded rise to
prominence out of the bosom of an impoverished
immigrant group, no doubt harking back to an
unerring combination of ambition, diligence and
perseverance. The lasting
economic transformation of the Portuguese more or
less coincides with their influential though
fleeting political and literary ascendancy. The
names of Cabral, dos Santos, Gomes, Mendes and
Netto once figured regularly in the nation's
dailies. Two of these, Albert Maria Gomes and
Alfred Hubert Mendes, were among the literary
pioneers of the Caribbean and flourished in the
1930s, a crucial decade in Trinidad's recent
political history. As a Portuguese Creole who began
as a radical, left-wing champion of the social,
economic, political, religious and cultural
underdog, Gomes loomed large on the political
scene. He made his mark in politics to the extent
that that political era was referred to as
"Gomesocracy" and he was undoubtedly one of
Trinidad's more colourful and controversial
federalist politicians. The magniloquent editor of
The Beacon, the monthly magazine which acted
as a forum for multifarious political views and
literary expression, Gomes was a close associate of
another outstanding product of the Portuguese
community, Alfred Mendes, who was the leader of the
pluridisciplinary and multiracial liberal socialist
group of early Trinidadian writers know as the
Beacon group and was also a successful civil
servant. In a remarkably
short space of time, the Portuguese community has
quietly spawned a number of eminent sons and
daughters of the soil, far out of proportion to its
relatively small size and against all odds, and has
contributed more than its fair share to the
progress of its adopted land. They remain small in
numbers but great in influence and occupational
status and the vast majority of Portuguese
descendants have become inseparably interwoven with
other ethnic groups, to form the total picture that
is unmistakably and irrevocably
Trinidadian. 1 More
correctly, carne vinha-d'alhos.
On
the 24th of November, 1783, the King of Spain
signed The Royal Cedula of Population. This decree
opened up the island of Trinidad to Catholics from
any country that would swear fealty to the Spanish
Crown. The effect on Trinidad was drastic and
immediate. In 1773, the population was
approximately 1,000 people of all races. By 1797,
the population had swelled to 18,627. What had been
an underdeveloped and backwater settlement, became
a significant colony in the West Indies. (From The
Portuguese of Trinidad by Jo-Anne S. Ferreira, as
published in The Book of Trinidad, edited by
Gérard Besson and Bridget Brereton, 263-269.
Port-of-Spain: Paria Publishing Co. Ltd., 1991,
reprinted with permission. This article was revised
by the author, and translated by Miguel Vale de
Almeida. It appeared as "Do Atlântico
às Antilhas: O Caso da Trinidad" in the
Madeiran magazine Islenha 19 (June to
December 1996: 95-107). Appendix 4 of the
Portuguese translation, however, does not appear in
this earlier article.) |
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