The wind catches her two masts and the schooner leans out across the harbor, an American flag snapping at the peak. The Ernestina is the last sailing ship that carried immigrants across the Atlantic to the United States in regular service, and the people she carried were Cape Verdeans, bound for the waterfront where their cousins already worked the docks. New Bedford built her in 1894. Cape Verde sailed her, salvaged her, restored her, and gave her back. No vessel anywhere tells the story of this city’s Cape Verdeans more completely than the one that brought so many of them here.
They came as free people, on their own terms, decades before Ellis Island opened its doors. That fact sits at the center of who the Cape Verdeans in New Bedford have always understood themselves to be.
New Bedford: The Place
New Bedford sits on the western shore of Buzzards Bay in southeastern Massachusetts, its harbor sheltered behind a hurricane barrier and the town of Fairhaven across the Acushnet River. In the nineteenth century it was the richest whaling port in the world, a city of wharves, chandleries, and three-deckers built close to the water. Cape Verdean families settled first near the South End waterfront and later spread up the spine of Acushnet Avenue toward the North End. The housing is dense and walkable, triple-deckers and storefronts within reach of the docks that drew people here in the first place.
How New Bedford Became the Cape Verdean Ellis Island
Before the Cape Verdeans
New Bedford’s fortune was built on whale oil. By the 1840s and 1850s its fleet ranged the entire globe, and the wealth of the captains and owners filled the mansions along County Street. The crews, by contrast, were drawn from anywhere a ship could find willing hands.
That hunger for labor reached across the Atlantic to a cluster of dry volcanic islands off the coast of West Africa. American whalers had been calling at Cape Verde since the 1790s to take on salt, water, and men. The islands, a Portuguese colony, had little to offer their own people and a great deal to offer a passing ship.
The Cape Verdeans Arrive
The first arrivals came as crew, not as passengers. A whaleship would put into the islands shorthanded, sign on a dozen men from Brava or Fogo, and sail for the Pacific. When the voyage ended in New Bedford, a few would step ashore and stay. Historian Marilyn Halter has put it plainly: without the whale, there would have been no Cape Verdean settlement in America at all.
The men came overwhelmingly from Brava and Fogo, the southern islands closest to the whaling grounds. Drought and famine pushed them out. A deadly famine struck in the 1830s, and an eruption of Fogo’s volcano followed in the 1840s, leaving young men with few choices beyond the deck of a foreign ship. Roughly five hundred to a thousand reached southern New England by whaler between 1820 and 1860, and the stream only widened after that.
These were the first Africans to cross the Atlantic to America by choice rather than in chains, and they arrived into a country that had no category for them. On the islands they were Portuguese colonial subjects who spoke Kriolu and called themselves Portuguese. In turn-of-the-century New Bedford, a race-conscious society tried to sort them into boxes that did not fit, and many insisted on naming themselves rather than accepting a label imposed from outside.
New Bedford at Its Peak
The largest wave landed between 1890 and 1921. Between 1800 and 1921, at least seventy percent of all Cape Verdean immigrants to the United States came ashore at New Bedford, which earned the nickname the Cape Verdean Ellis Island. At the height of the migration more than a dozen packet boats ran between the islands and the city, the main port of entry for an entire people.
As whaling collapsed in the early twentieth century, Cape Verdean mariners did something remarkable. They bought the aging schooners outright and ran their own shipping line. Between 1860 and 1965, Cape Verdeans owned forty-one percent of the packets trading between New England and the islands, vessels with names like the Coriolanus, the Savoia, and the Arcturus. Owners such as Henrique Mendes, Roy Teixeira, and the Lopes family carried cargo and relatives across three thousand miles of ocean on schedules they set themselves.
Ashore, the work was hard and seasonal. Men loaded ships as longshoremen and dockworkers; women cleaned houses in the wealthier wards. Each fall, whole families rode out to the cranberry bogs of southeastern Massachusetts to harvest the crop, then came back to the city for winter. The photographer Lewis Hine, hunting evidence of child labor, turned his camera on Cape Verdean children stooped over the bogs in the 1920s, and those images survive as some of the earliest portraits of the community at work.
The Change
The door closed in the early 1920s. New federal immigration quotas throttled the flow, and the packet trade slowed to a trickle even as the old schooners kept running. For half a century the community grew mostly from within, holding its language and its festas while fewer new faces arrived from the islands.
Then came July 5, 1975, the day Cape Verde won independence from Portugal after five hundred years. Migration resumed, and the second wave looked different from the first: more women, more islands represented beyond Brava and Fogo, more teachers and professionals alongside the laborers. The new arrivals settled into a city where the Cape Verdean presence was already generations deep, and they made the neighborhoods of New Bedford feel, once again, like an extension of home.
The Landmarks of the Cape Verdean New Bedford
Our Lady of the Assumption Church, 47 South Sixth Street. Founded on August 15, 1905, this is the first Cape Verdean Catholic parish in the Americas. It was born of exclusion: Cape Verdeans worshipping at St. John the Baptist met prejudice from Portuguese parishioners, so the Bishop of Fall River entrusted Father Stanislaus Bernard with the spiritual care of all Catholics known as Cape Verdeans in the city. The parish began in a chapel on South Water Street, was flooded out by Hurricane Carol in 1954, and moved to South Sixth Street in 1957, where it marked its 120th anniversary in 2025.
The Schooner Ernestina-Morrissey, State Pier. Built in Essex in 1894 as the Effie M. Morrissey, she carried Arctic explorer Robert Bartlett to within 578 miles of the North Pole before sinking after a fire in New York in 1947. Captain Henrique Mendes raised her, renamed her for his own daughter, and ran her as a Cape Verde packet from 1948 to 1965. In 1982 the young Republic of Cape Verde restored her and gave her to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and after a full rebuild in Maine she returned to New Bedford in November 2022 as the official state vessel.
The Cape Verdean Beneficent Association, the Sociedade Building. Established in 1916 under its first president, Filipe Nicolau Soares, this is the oldest Cape Verdean organization in the United States. It began the way immigrant mutual-aid societies always did, pooling small dues to cover a funeral or carry a sick member through a hard month, and it became a fixture of community life for the generations that followed.
The Bomb Shelter, Acushnet Avenue. This Cape Verdean social club opened in the 1940s, started by Alfred “Néné” Pina, who had come from the islands as a teenager. Men gathered there after their shifts to trade news, play Portuguese card games, and hear the old songs, and for decades it anchored the social world of the avenue. It is remembered now as one of the warm, ordinary places where a transplanted island culture kept itself alive.
The Strand Theater, North End, Acushnet Avenue. The old Strand played movies for eighty-five years before it was abandoned. In 1990 a group of Cape Verdean residents bought the fire-damaged building and set out to turn it into a cultural center; they incorporated the Cape Verdean Association in New Bedford in 1995. The multimillion-dollar restoration is still underway, aiming to give the community a permanent home for music, art, and youth programming on the same street where it has always lived.
The Zeiterion Theatre, 684 Purchase Street. In 1999 Cesária Évora, the barefoot diva of São Vicente and the reigning queen of the morna, played New Bedford’s grand old downtown theater. The crowd treated it less like a world-music concert than a village festa, dancing in the aisles and shouting up to the stage in Kriolu while she shouted back. For one night the Zeiterion belonged entirely to Cape Verde.
Where the New Bedford Cape Verdeans Came From
The first and largest streams flowed from Brava and Fogo, the two southern islands of the archipelago. Brava, the smallest inhabited island, sent so many of its sons to sea that the early Cape Verdean New Englanders were often simply called Bravas. Both islands lay nearest the whaling routes and suffered worst from the droughts that made staying impossible, which is why their people filled the forecastles and, eventually, the South End.
After independence in 1975 the origins broadened. Migrants arrived from Santiago, São Vicente, and the other islands, widening a community that had begun with two. The bond never weakened: the storms that still batter Cape Verde, like the one that struck São Vicente in 2025, are answered in New Bedford with fundraisers and relief drives within days.
New Bedford Today
Massachusetts is home to more than seventy thousand Cape Verdean Americans, the largest such population of any state, and New Bedford remains one of its two great anchors alongside the Cape Verdean community in Brockton. The neighborhoods are not a museum. Cachupa, the slow-cooked stew of hominy and beans that Cape Verdeans call the taste of home, still simmers in restaurant kitchens up and down Acushnet Avenue, and a March cachupa festival now pits ten cooks against one another for the city’s verdict.
Every July the Cape Verdean Recognition Parade steps off from Buttonwood Park and winds down to the Veterans Memorial Hall, a tradition that began in 1972 and reached its fifty-third year in 2025, timed that summer to the fiftieth anniversary of independence. The flag goes up, the Kriolu carries over the crowd, and the same word keeps surfacing to describe the feeling of the day: morabeza, the particular Cape Verdean brand of warmth and welcome.
The community that grew up beside New Bedford’s Portuguese has long since stopped asking permission to be itself, and you can trace the same confidence in Cape Verdean enclaves as far afield as the Portuguese-speaking blocks of Newark’s Ironbound. New Bedford built the ship, Cape Verde sent her back, and her sails still fill in the harbor every summer. The story that started with a whale has not ended; it has simply learned to dance in the aisles.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Cape Verdeans settle in New Bedford?
They came through the whaling industry. New Bedford whalers had recruited crew from Cape Verde since the 1790s, and when those voyages ended in the harbor, sailors from Brava and Fogo began to stay. Drought and famine at home gave them every reason not to return, and a settlement took root by the docks.
Is New Bedford still a Cape Verdean city today?
Yes. The Cape Verdeans in New Bedford number around ten thousand, part of the largest Cape Verdean population of any U.S. state, and the culture is visibly alive. The July recognition parade, the cachupa restaurants along Acushnet Avenue, and the ongoing restoration of the Strand Theater all keep the community at the center of the city’s life.
What are the most famous Cape Verdean landmarks in New Bedford?
The schooner Ernestina-Morrissey, the last sailing immigrant ship to the United States, is the best known, now the official Massachusetts state vessel berthed at State Pier. Our Lady of the Assumption, founded in 1905, is the first Cape Verdean Catholic parish in the Americas. The Cape Verdean Beneficent Association, established in 1916, is the oldest Cape Verdean organization in the country.
Where did the Cape Verdeans in New Bedford come from?
The earliest and largest groups came from Brava and Fogo, the southern islands nearest the whaling grounds, so much so that the first arrivals were often just called Bravas. After Cape Verde won independence in 1975, the second wave brought people from Santiago, São Vicente, and the other islands as well.
When did Cape Verdeans first arrive in New Bedford?
The first Cape Verdeans reached New Bedford on whaling crews in the early nineteenth century, with records of the connection going back to the 1790s. The largest wave arrived between 1890 and 1921, when New Bedford served as the main port of entry and earned the nickname the Cape Verdean Ellis Island.
If your family’s story passed through the wharves of New Bedford or the islands of Cape Verde, every name, ship, and street is a thread worth following back.