Portuguese Americans

The First Portuguese Americans

Portuguese presence in North America predates the creation of the United States, though the first Portuguese to come to the continent were explorers who did not settle down. João Rodrigues Cabrilho was the first to navigate the coast of what is now California, for instance, and before Miguel Corte-Real was lost at sea around 1502, he navigated the far northeast coast. A popular theory among amateurs and the general public is that Dighton Rock, a large boulder in Berkeley, Massachusetts, covered in petroglyphs, is a testament to Portuguese presence in Massachusetts either in Corte-Real's time (shortly after Columbus's discovery of the Americas) or even from a pre-Columbian contact.

An April 1942 meeting of the Provincetown, Massachusetts, board of selectmen, which was made up nearly entirely of men of Portuguese descent. The Azorean and continental Portuguese of Provincetown acquired political power after experiencing anti-Catholic discrimination in the early 20th century.

Two things are noteworthy: first, that the popularity of the Portuguese petroglyph theory owes a great deal to the prevalence of the Portuguese American and Luso American population in Massachusetts, who would be interested and gratified by the idea that their forebears preceded the Puritans to their present home state; and second, that [Page 1740]the same petroglyphs have been used to support numerous other theories, including the more recent pop history theory that they were the creation of Chinese explorers in the early 15th century.

Immigration to Massachusetts did begin quite early, however, and the first Portuguese settlers in the United States came to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket in the pre-revolutionary period. The so-called Virginia Hercules, Peter Francisco (1760–1831), was an Azorean immigrant to Virginia, and he served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War as a teenager. By age 16, at the Battle of Brandywine, he was already six and a half feet tall—in an age when people on average were several inches shorter than they are today.

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