The schooner "Yukon” became famous in the Cape Verde service. Although she made a 36 -day passage to 
Providence, R. I., she lost an impromptu race when her time was bettered by another packet, the "Valkyrie” 
NO MORE PACKETS TO THE CAPE VERDES 
The War Has Written What May Be the Last Chapter of a Colorful Packet Service 
By CARLOS C. HANKS 
HEN the one-time whaling schooner 
John R. Manta sailed from Provi¬ 
dence in 193^to carry her forty-two 
passengers and crew into oblivion, 
there came to an end the packet 
service that had operated between 
Providence, R. I., and the Cape Verde Islands for 
orty-three years. Every one of the forty-odd schooners 
• — most of them old Gloucester fishermen — which had 
naintained the intermittent service through the years, 
lad either worn out completely or had fallen victim to 
vind and wave. With those which went down, defeated 
)y storm, went also more than two hundred human 
)eings who were their crews and passengers. There was 
nuch that was gallant and picturesque in the old 
>ackets, but there was much, too, that was pathetic. 
There was gallantry in the courage of the Brava sailors 
n venturing matter-of-factly on a 3000-mile voyage in 
. small schooner, usually weakened in hull and masts by 
he batterings of nearly half a century at sea. 
There was picturesqueness in the poultry and pigs, 
,nd sometimes even a cow, penned on deck to provide 
t’esh food along the weary sea road. There was pictur- 
squeness in the passengers and in the veritable litter of 
in trunks, parrot cages and guitars that constituted not 
nly their baggage but the sum total, of their earthly 
ossessions. But there was a pathos to the packet service 
bat was inescapable. It lay in the frailness of the craft 
o which those homesick Bravas entrusted their lives as 
r ell as their goods; the absence of radio to call aid in 
me of need; the stark primitiveness of living conditions 
n board, with men, women and children cooped up 
i close quarters below decks and tossed about, some¬ 
times for months; the atmosphere of almost helpless 
poverty about both the ships and the humans they bore 
away. 
Antonio Coelho, who died about a year ago at the age 
of ninety-two, took the first packet out of Providence 
for Brava in 1892. With his death, only Frank Silva and 
Captain Henry D. Rose remain of the packet line men 
around Providence. The former owned and outfitted 
several of the ancient fishermen and coastal schooners, 
while the latter sailed on board them, from cabin boy at 
the age of thirteen, to master. Coelho had sailed as 
owner and supercargo of his little 64-ton former coasting 
schooner Nellie May back in 1892 on that first trip of 
any Cape Verde packet from Providence. The Nellie 
May had been at sea only a few days when her captain, 
a patriarch of the whaling fleet, died of a heart seizure. 
The mate, who didn’t know much about navigation, 
tried his hand at navigating. The Nellie May kept on in 
the general direction of the Cape Verdes for more than 
a month and finally sighted a Liverpool-bound steamer 
which informed the mate that he was 500 miles due 
south of the islands. Back on the right course again, the 
tiny schooner hauled into Brava after forty-five days at 
sea, and the fifty passengers who had paid from $15 
down to nothing for their passage, thankfully stepped 
ashore. 
Captain Henry Rose is another to whom the packet 
service has brought vicissitudes, including a two-hour 
swim in mid-Atlantic. He remembers to this day just 
where he took that swim. It was in 53° 30' West Longi¬ 
tude, 34° 37' North Latitude. Rose was twenty-one 
years old and was master of the packet schooner Yolante 
at the time. He was making his second trip in her, and 
