Gazela Oral History Project: First Report
- agrosso6
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Our shipmates Nancy Linden and Becca Kurtz have returned from their trip to Portugal, where they captured words and memories from people with a personal history with Gazela. Some were part of Gazela Primeiro's crew while she was still an active codfishing boat, and they even spoke with the man who served as the engineer on the voyage that brought her over to Philadelphia in 1971. Below is the first of many blurbs that they'll be sharing from their time abroad as well as in the states.
If you have your own Gazela stories to share, you can share it with them at history@philashipguild.org. Here's to another 125 years of creating memories and writing history!
Hello again, friends! Nancy and I are some weeks returned from Portugal and eager to tell you about all that we saw. I hope these entries offer you a sense of the many lives Gazela has harbored, some of which we encountered in our travels, others which we heard about only in stories, and many here at home, still happening in the hold. I thought, for our first post back, I would start by telling you about the family who brought her into existence: the Bensaudes.
We were lucky to encounter a branch of the family at the end of our travels, in Lisbon. It was a bookend sort of meeting, talking about Gazela’s very beginnings while our trip reached its very end. We enjoyed a beautiful lunch. In attendance were Joaquim Bensaude, son of Felipe Bensaude, grandson of Vasco Bensaude, as well as Fernando Grego Dias, a long-time director of the Bensaude business and a contact of Nancy’s from prior trips. The family being from the Portuguese islands of the Azores, we of course drank Azorean wine (“too full of minerals,” Joaquim griped, “we can’t keep the salt out of it”), ate Azorean tuna, and had Azorean pineapple for dessert. We were told a great deal about the family history in the tangent-prone manner of good storytellers. I will try to get some of it down here for you in an orderly fashion.
The first Bensaudes arrived on the islands from Morocco in the early 1800’s. Did you know there is a long Jewish diasporic history in the Azores? I did not. Joaquim's ancestors chose their surname for its Portuguese sound, and quickly became involved in the shipping of Azorean oranges to the UK through family ties in England. From the mid-19th to the early 20th century, there were more than 300 vessels sailing between Sao Miguel and the UK carrying citrus; the orange trade was the largest industry on the island of Sao Miguel. Joaquin’s great-great-great-grandfather, Abraham or Abraao in Portuguese, acquired a boat, picked up some citrus, and made the family’s first of many fortunes.
In 1873, with steady income but declining orange business, the Bensaudes bought in full a two-masted schooner, Dolphin, which they had owned a partial share of since 1871. They repaired and rechristened the schooner “Gazelle,” upon which they set out whaling, another dominant marine pursuit of the Azores, in addition to carrying cargo. They changed the Gazelle’s rig to a brigantine in 1876, for reasons unknown. The next change came with a significant repair in 1883, misconstrued as a new construction, and a second rechristening, this time to Gazella with two ‘L’s. In 1891, the Bensaudes formed a fishing partnership, the Parceria Geral de Pescarias, contributing its eight cod boats and two whalers, of which the brigantine Gazella was one. That vessel sailed out of the business’s new headquarters in Lisbon, whaling and running cargo to the islands, and transitioned to codfishing exclusively in 1896. We know her to have sailed to the Grand Banks under captain Paulo Fernandes Bagao in 1899.
Our Gazela was built by the Bensaudes in 1900 and launched in 1901 to utilize the fishing license of the former Gazella, which had reached the end of her working life. What that means about the relationship between the two ships is up to you - Nancy feels that there is one continuous spirit between them, while I am liable to think of the older vessel as a grandparent. Regardless, that ship represents a valuable pre-history to our fine barquentine, and Gazela’s whole fishing career - from 1901 to 1969 with rare interruption - took place under the Parceria that built her. The Bensaude business, as contained in the Parceria, remained in Lisbon until 1976.
In the 20th century, the Bensaude’s interests diversified. As a result of their remarkable success in the fishing industry, Joaquim’s grandfather Vasco Bensaude was able to generate a lively and creative industry back home in the Azores, expanding the family business into manufacturing, farming, and hospitality. The 1974 revolution in Portugal also forced change in the business. The dependence of the cod fishing industry on the dictatorship is a sensitive topic, but during our modern-day lunch in 2026, it was treated gracefully. Joaquim expressed diplomatically that his family was in support of the revolution ideologically, and that the economic consequences were outside of their control - the business just had to take the hit. His father, Filipe Bensaude, oversaw this transitional moment, taking the loss of the cod fishing industry in stride and seeking opportunity elsewhere. His efforts seem to have paid off. The Bensaude Group is now a conglomerate of enterprises, dealing in energy, distribution, shipping, and tourism. In fact, our lunch with Fernando and Joaquim took place at a Bensaude property, the Hotel Acores Lisboa.
Joaquim is not involved in the business any longer but lives his life still with one foot in Lisbon and one foot at home in Sao Miguel. He is a lively and generous man, and showed up to lunch with a file of documents on Gazela. Fernando, for his part, was the glue of our meeting. He had years ago put Nancy in contact with Helder Claro (pictured above showing the storehouse of the Parceria), another Bensaude executive who by all accounts was a gem. It was in their company that Nancy and Lou went to see the old store house Gazela used. Fernando, now retired, is wonderful at making these connections and at lunch is who we all turn to when a particular date is forgotten, or a detail needs corroborating.
A quiet expert. Joaquim had no archeological field trips to offer, but had pictures of Gazela on hand (like this one above from a 1992 print of Sail Martha’s Vineyard), and recalls fondly the trips he took on board in the 70s as a teenager. He says he was even on board during some of the ‘76 OpSail festivities!
The Bensaudes persist in moving things around on the water in this century, and so does Gazela. How remarkable! Through the changes of technologies and of economies, both have found ways to survive and put out to sea, year after year. The dealings of the Bensaude family predate the construction of our barquentine, but she did not know a fishing day without them. In this way, their story is hers.