JOE SILVEY AND THE PORTUGUESE DIASPORA

IN EARLY BRITISH COLUMBIA

 

By Jean Barman

(Written for “Dreams on the Canvas of the Diaspora” Conference, Toronto, 17 January 2004)

 

Thank you very much for having me.  It’s an honour to be here among so many of Joe Silvey’s countrymen and to share some of his story with you. 

 

You might well ask at the onset--how is it that I who am not Portuguese should have encountered Joe Silvey.  He found me, and not me him, or rather his family did.  They, and not myself, need to be thanked for his story being told.   I knew a bit about his life and talked about him briefly on a CBC Vancouver radio show.  Shortly thereafter the CBC received a letter from two of his great-great-great-grandsons Kyle and Cole Silvey, then aged 4 and 7. They wanted to know more.  I wrote them the story entitled “The Remarkable Adventures of Portuguese Joe Silvey.” Shortly thereafter there was a family reunion and I brought some copies. There was great enthusiasm for the story.  It has been read by many family members, who have then shared insights and photographs with me, and also sold within the Portuguese community in Vancouver.  

 

The enthusiasm shown by Joe Silvey’s family is a model for how all of us should respect our history as families and communities.  Grandchildren and grandparents need to talk to each other.  The stories to be told about the Portuguese community in Toronto and across Canada are wonderful.  We will all be the richer for them.

 

As for Portuguese Joe Silvey’s story, last fall Habour Publishing also got excited, which means that Joe’s story will appear as an illustrated book entitled THE REMARKABLE ADVENTURES OF PORTUGUESE JOE SILVEY in April 2004.   I am very excited that this remarkable man will finally get some of the credit due to him as Portuguese, as Azorean, British Columbian, and Canadian.  He was all of these.

 

Joe Silvey is to my mind a good news story.  It is the story of a Portuguese immigrant to Canada, more accurately to the future Canada, who came with nothing but the clothes on his back and made good.  He did so because of the values of hard work with which he came, values that were imbued in him during his childhood on the Azores. 

 

To understand how this came about, we need to start in the Azores Islands.  Few areas of the world are as geographically far apart as the Azores in the mid-Atlantic Ocean and the northwest coast of North America on the Pacific Ocean.  Yet, during the middle of the 19^th century a handful of Azoreans not only made it from one to the other, but settled down to create what we might term a small diaspora.  Because the numbers were so small, perhaps we should more accurately call it a diasporinho.   Not only did Joe Silvey and the others settle down, they and their descendants long retained as many elements as possible of their Portuguese, and more particularly, their Azorean origins. 

 

These families did so despite all of the Azoreans of the first generation being men.  Indeed, one of the reasons encouraging them to maintain tradition were the women they took as their wives, who were mostly Native Indians.  The prejudice toward such persons meant that the men turned more than ever to their own way of life as a template for thought and action.  They respected their wives and had large families by them, but they did not consider that their backgrounds mattered as much as did their own. 

 

Two reasons explain why these men, and Joe Silvey in particular, made it to the northwest coast of North America, to today’s British Columbia.  The first factor drew them out of the Azores, the second to the northwest coast.

 

Joe Silvey was born on Pico Island, which has at its centre a volcano, for whose point the island is named.   There is only a small strip of rock-strewn arable land where the volcano’s slopes meet the sea.  Long before Joe was born, Pico Islanders used the rocks to make stone fences to mark out their hard-worked plots from each other’s.  Most families grew potatoes as a subsistence crop, ensuring they had something to eat during the winter.  Some pastured cattle on the volcano’s slopes.  Lower down, others grew figs for sale or grapes for wine, but many more depended on the sea.

 

Pico families had fished for generations.  By the time Joe was a child in the late 1830s and early 1840s, they also hunted whales as they migrated by the island.  It was not the animal’s flesh that was eaten, but rather its blubber beneath the skin that was boiled for oil that could be sold for much needed cash. 

 

When Joe’s father was a boy, ships in search of whales began to arrive in the Azores from the northeastern United States.  World whaling was dominated during these years by the Americans, who had their home port at New Bedford, Massachusetts, not far from Boston.  Stopping to pick up supplies on nearby Faial Island, ships also took on crew as needed.  Men wanting jobs came from all over the Azores, especially from poorly endowed Pico Island.  Joe’s father had whaled, and young Joe also did so as soon as he was able.   It was at about the age of 12, probably in the late 1840s, that Joe first went to sea. 

 

Whaling got Joe and many of his contemporaries away from the Azores.  But what drew them to the northwest coast?  It was the possibility of finding gold.  The gold rush that broke out in California in 1849 drew thousands of persons from all over the world, including many Portuguese.  Gold finds moved steadily north, and it was in the spring of 1858 that news spread of gold being discovered on the Fraser River in the southwest of today’s British Columbia.   Until then the area was home to a handful of fur traders and, of course, the Native people who had lived there since time memorial.  It was a very remote, very distant place.

 

All the same, this opportunity for a better life could not be passed up.  Joe Silvey told his children about how he dropped off of a whaling ship along with five other crew members, all of them Portuguese and possibly from the Azores.   In one version of the story, the newcomers got a hold of a dugout canoe and headed up the Fraser River in search of their fortunes.  They paddled past the rough new settlement of New Westminster, past the longtime fur trading post of Fort Langley, and on they went.  They might have gotten as far as Yale at the beginning of the Fraser Canyon.  Perhaps they were already mining when, the story goes, they were warned about the local Indians.  The Indians, they were told, wanted to get rid of newcomers, who, they considered, were trespassing on their land.  The young Portuguese men became convinced they were about to be attacked.  They did not want to be killed.  So they took their canoe back down the river as fast as they could, back to where they had jumped ship.

 

When the men were almost there, the story continues, some Musqueam Indians appeared on the bank of the Fraser River, not far from where the Vancouver Airport is today.  Joe and the others were convinced their time had come.  They would not be able to escape twice with their lives.  Then they realized the Indians were not hostile.  Indeed, they were beckoning the men toward them.  Grand chief Kiapilano stood in the middle of the crowd to welcome them ashore.  They decided to take a chance.  They were tired and badly needed something to eat.  Much to their relief, the Indians treated them kindly and gave them food.  They were invited to stay the night.

 

It was thus, the story concludes, that Joe Silvey found his a wife.  Chief Kiapilano’s granddaughter Khaltinaht caught his eye.   As Joe later told his eldest daughter Elizabeth, “she was a pretty girl with dark eyes, and hair down to her middle; large deep soft eyes.”  He soon discovered she felt as kindly toward him as he did toward her. 

 

Joe Silvey’s resourcefulness comes out in the story of how he asked his prospective grandfather-in-law for Khaltinaht’s hand in marriage.  You need to remember that they did not know each other’s language.  Let me share his eldest daughter’s account:  “Mother and father were out in a canoe, and then afterwards father said by signs, to the old chief, Chief Kiapilano, that he wanted my mother for his wife, and could he have her; all by signs.  Then the old chief said, by signs, that he could; waved his hand and arm with a motion signifying to ‘take her.’  He motioned with his right arm waved, quickly, upward and outward.”

 

The marriage ceremony respected Aboriginal practice.  And here I’m again quoting their daughter Elizabeth: “In those days they were married under Indian law. … The old Chief, Chief Kiapilano, took my father, and the chief of the Musqueams took my mother, and the two chiefs put them together. … They had canoes and canoes and canoes, all drawn up on the beach, and a great crowd of Indians, and they had a great time.  They had a lot of stuff for the festivities, Indian blankets, and all sorts of things, and threw it all away; they had a great big potlatch.  And, then, they put my mother and father in a great big canoe with a lot of blankets; made them sit on top of the blankets, and then brought them over to their home.”

 

I don’t have time to recount all of Joe Silvey’s remarkable adventures, as he sought to make the best possible life for himself and his family in what must have been from his perspective a distant, remote land, but I encourage you to read the book.  

 

Joe was extremely versatile, at different points in time fishing in nearby Georgia Strait, capturing whales in Burrard Inlet, running a saloon for loggers in Gastown, the future Vancouver, and then operating a combination saloon and store on the shores of the future Stanley Park.  Joe suffered his share of tragedy.  His young wife Khaltinaht died of influenzia in 1871 shortly after the birth of their second daughter.   Joe rebounded by finding another Native wife named Lucy, this time from up the coast near when he was fishing in a boat he built himself and named the Morning Star after a whaler on which either he or his father had served.   Joe already had two daughters with Khaltinaht, he began a second family of ten children with Lucy.

 

In his actions, Joe Silvey was sustained by his countrymen.  There is no way to know how many were ensnared by the gold rush.   We don’t know the names of the five men Joe said he jumped ship with, but they may have included Azores countrymen Estalon Bittencourt, John Enos whose surname was probably a simplification of Ignacio, John Norton, John Silva, and Peter Smith who is said to have changed his name for fear of being caught as a deserter.   Each of these men have their own stories to tell about how they settled down, much like Joe, in British Columbia.   Here I only want to make a very important general point about this little diasporinho of men from the Azores who made their lives in British Columbia.  That is that they repeatedly got their strength and achieved their successes by drawing on their Portuguese heritage.

 

On the one hand, Joe Silvey and the others had left the Azores behind them. In practice, they took much of the Islands with them.  Over four hundred years before these men’s birth, ships from the country of Portugal landed on the Azores and decided the islands belonged to them.  The men and women who came from Portugal to settle the Azores brought their way of life with them from the ‘mainland,’ as Portugal came to be known.  Everyone adhered to the precepts of the Catholic Church and took pride in right behaviour.  They took large families for granted.  Men were responsible to support them with their labour, while women held sway in the home. Azoreans maintained a traditional peasant life style despite growing contact with outsiders, and these men in British Columbia did so as well.

 

The gold rush that drew these men to the northwest coast of North America soon petered out, meaning they had to make a decision whether or not to move on.   Whereas numerous Portuguese left for some other adventure, these men and others took up the opportunity to settle down.  It was on March 23, 1867, the Victoria newspaper reported, that, “Joseph Silva, a native of Portugal, took the oaths … and became a naturalized British subject.”  According to the story passed down to his grandson, he, “was the first Portuguese in Canada to receive British Citizenship and was called ‘Portugee Joe No. 1’ for that reason.”  I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that the declaration meant he could now vote and exercise the civil rights available to all other British subjects living in British Columbia.  Very importantly he could take up land and almost immediately did so.

 

In settling down, Joe and the others drew on the occupational skills they had acquired back home or on the sea.  John Enos became a very successful farmer near Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, as did John Silva on Gabriola Island and both John Norton and Estalon Bittencourt on Salt Spring Island.  Like Joe Silvey, Peter Smith fished and whales.  Indeed, the two men often worked together and for a time lived next door to each other on the shores of the future Stanley Park.  

 

These half dozen men from the Azores were also resourceful in finding local women for their wives. Estalon Bittencourt and John Norton turned to the daughters of American blacks who had come to British Columbia during the gold rush to escape racial discrimination in the United States and, where they did not bring their wives with them, found Native wives.  The other men from the Azores found Indian women.  Many of the other gold miners who stayed in British Columbia also took Native wives, but in general were far less likely to remain loyal to them than Joe and his fellow Portuguese.  

 

Joe Silvey took great pride in his growing family.  As time passed, more and more newcomers settled in the future Vancouver, where he lived, bringing with them racist attitudes generally accepted whence they came.  Indians were scorned and persons of mixed race, as were Joe’s children, denigrated as ‘half breeds.’  Portuguese Joe could likely recall ‘the old days’ at Gastown when everyone was accepted on their merits as opposed to the accident of birth. 

 

Joe Silvey’s determination that his children would have the best possible opportunity to get ahead explains why in about 1880, well in middle age, he pulled up stakes once more and moved his family to their own island, Reid Island not far from present day Nanaimo.  Between him and his eldest son Domingo he took up the entire island.  There he could create a life style for his family much more consistent with his own upbringing and also live, in general, closer to his fellow Azoreans settled nearby.  The men’s ability to visit back and forth, and to gain strength from each other, was facilitated by water being the principal transportation route.  Even if they principally farmed, men might well have their own boat comparable to Joe Silvey’s Morning Star.  Or they could use the vessels that regularly plied the coast to keep in touch with each other. 

 

Joe Silvey’s story, as I’ve told it in THE REMARKABLE ADVENTURES OF PORTUGUESE JOE SILVEY, is as much about his children and their lives as it is about him.  Three of his children shared stories with others during their lifetimes, and I have had the privilege of several of his grandchildren and great grandchildren talking with me.   Taken together, these accounts make clear the very great extent to which a Portuguese diasparinho long existed in coastal British Columbia.  

 

In what was a quasi-subsistence lifestyle similar to Pico Island, survival on Reid Island combined fishing with a bit of farming and shopkeeping.  Around the windows of the house Joe Silvey built for his family he ran a grapevine said to have come from Portugal, if not literally then in spirit, and not far away planted an apple yard.   A daughter explained how, “Father had a little store on Reid Island, alongside of the house,” very convenient to the water route much used by sailing vessels going up and down the coast.   She continued, “Grandpa did all kinds of fishing according to the seasons—perch fishing with a small net, cod fishing with hook and line, trolling for spring and blue back salmon, clam digging night and day with low tide.”  In the 1901 census Joe Silvey described himself as a fisherman who earned $600 over the past year, a fair income for the time. 

 

In many ways Joe Silvey remained a Portuguese peasant all his life.  Just as his father had done for him on Pico Island, he was determined to imbue his children with traditional values.  They gained an appreciation of being Portuguese, an identity they would proudly carry with them through their own and their descendants’ lifetimes.  To the extent there was adaptation, it came most visibly in language.  Silvey family members spoke, as a matter of course, Portuguese, the trading jargon of Chinook that virtually everyone knew up and down the coast, the local Cowichan Indian language, and English. 

 

On Reid Island Joe Silvey mentored his sons into the life of the sea.  From their early teens they went fishing with him.  The family continued to fish much as he might have in the Azores, making nets during the winter and during the fishing season taking the nets out into the deep water, surrounding the fish, and then dragging the nets ashore, for which a dozen men were usually needed. Whereas sons worked alongside their father, daughters were expected to marry young and, in traditional fashion, produce large families.  For the most part, they did so, moving away to where their husbands could best make a living.

 

Fishing and the water encouraged sociability that fanned out from Reid Island.  According to a granddaughter, “lots of Portuguese people came around Reid, grandpa used to be the leader of them.”  An entry from October 7, 1883, in the diary of an Anglican missionary who lived nearby is revealing both for what it tells about Joe’ little store and about the sense of community that joined this Portuguese diasporinho.  “Halfway between Joe Silvia’s Island & Cowichan Gap we saw Joe. S. [Joe Silvey] and [John] Norton of Ganges Harbour [on Salt Spring] hauling dog-fish from their lines. … Running back to Joe’s Island there was a strong wind & heavy sea.  We reefed mainsail--ran into a very small cove at Joe’s place.  Got some provisions at his store.  It was wet & stormy as we went home.” 

 

Joe Silvey’s legacy continued long after he died in 1902 aged about 66 years old.  Grandchildren’s descriptions of growing up in the 1920s and 1930s on Reid Island, where three of his sons made their lives, points up how influential were the priorities he set for them. 

 

A granddaughter emphasized to me how her father brought her up so far as possible as he himself had been raised.  “I didn’t know how to speak English for a long time. I got the Chinook mixed up with the Portuguese.  Dad spoke Portuguese.  He threw Chinook at us.  All of the old people knew the Cowichan language, even some of the white fishermen.  So, for a long time we didn’t know there were different nationalities.  We thought everyone was the same.” 

 

Reid’s isolation helped to maintain a Portuguese lifestyle that in retrospect acquired an idyllic quality.  “We were happy, we were content, we had love.  There was a togetherness in those days that there’s not now.”  Children were taught deference and respect.  “You weren’t allowed to talk to anyone.  No kids were allowed around when adults were talking”  “We were all trying to help the older people.”

 

Through the hard times of the Great Depression in the 1930s there was sociability. Church services were obligatory on Sundays.  “The priest either came to Reid or we went to Kuper [a nearby island].”    There were also events during the week. “We used to go on picnics and make everything on the beach—we would take flour, baking powder, etc—we would catch the fish.”  Dances were held on the weekend.  Joe’s sons Domingo and Tony both, “played the button accordion.”  Tony also “played the violin, guitar, mouth organ, and Jew’s harp.”  As for a granddaughter, “I got a kerchief and learned a dance, each person held an end of a kerchief, I put it around and over the head, we did this Portuguese dance.” 

 

Traditional protocols held.  “We had our brothers as chaperones at dances.  We couldn’t sit together and hold hands, we were told if we held hands or looked at each other we’d get pregnant.”  Another of Portuguese Joe’s granddaughters recalled how “mother said babies are under cabbage leaves, it was my older sister who had to tell us things.”  The prohibitions served their purpose. “For a large family no one came home pregnant, and no boys made girls pregnant.”

 

Joe Silvey’s grandchildren were brought up to a lifestyle premised on self-sufficiency much as had been his sons and daughters.  “My aunt would say, ‘get up, Irene, & watch me.’”  The women  “taught the young children cooking, bread making, canning, knitting, sewing, they took time out for us.”  The “men made their own bacon and ham,” and this skill was also passed down.  “We were taught very young how to accomplish every job, we had to do it over and over again until we got it.”

 

I could go on and give you other examples of how traditional Portuguese protocols long held, but time is passing.   Let me make just make a quick concluding point and that is that the legacy of this group of migrants is far more powerful than their numbers.   In size they were very much a diasporinho rather than a diaspora.  

 

All the same, these men from the Azores have left an important legacy for all of us.  If we look just as Joe Silvey from among them, he had six sons and four daughters that survived into adulthood.  There were at least 70 grandchildren, well over half of them bearing the Silvey surname, many more great-grandchildren and on into the present day.  These descendants have contributed in diverse and significant ways to the development of the province’s fishing industry and more generally to the social infrastructure of British Columbia and Canada. 

 

The resourcefulness of these families drew in good part from their strong sense of identity.  Joe Silvey, like the other men, inculcated into his children the traditional Portuguese values of his childhood, and these they sought to pass down to the next generation.  As did the others, he understood the importance of community for family survival through difficult times and laid the foundation for a largely self-sustaining way of life that has given satisfaction to hundreds of descendants across the generations.   As one of them emphasized to me not long ago, “We have always been such a proud family of being Portuguese.  They were a proud lot and we still are to this day.”