108 
YACHTING 
Canvas covers for guns, machinery 
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and damage fabric. To meet this 
need International has produced a 
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canvas and seams. It limits the possibility of staining, 
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International 
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"i 
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AGENTS IN EVERY IMPORTANT PORT 
NO MORE PACKETS TO THE 
CAPE VERDES 
(Continued from page 49) 
Providence, one hundred and twenty-two persons, on a trip in 
April, 1921. The Jeffrey was a three-master of 296 net tons, 
120.5 feet long and 30.5 feet beam, and was built at Boston in 
1881. A newspaper description of her passenger quarters was 
printed in a Providence newspaper: “ Accommodations are 
primitive. The passengers live in the hold, which is barer of 
paint than an old Rhode Island barn. Beginning within a few 
feet of the bow, a double tier of bunks runs away aft to the stern 
and comes back on the other side. The women’s quarters are 
separated from the men’s by a rough board partition running 
from the main to the mizzenmast amidships, and occupies 
about one-third the starboard side of the hold. The entrance is 
through the same hatches through which the cargoes of coal 
were formerly dumped, although rough ladders are provided for 
the human freight. A filling of corn husks takes the place of a 
mattress in each bunk, and the bareness of the hold suggests 
that the passengers must supply their own coverings. The deck 
houses are equally bare, having the same slat bunks, single ones 
for the crew. There are no tables, no chairs, no seats, no any¬ 
thing in the way of furniture. The after cabin fills the center of 
the deck so that the places where passengers may exercise is 
limited to two 50-foot narrow passages, one on each side of the 
ship. For baths, the whole Atlantic ocean is just over the side.” 
Captain Henry Rose came home from the islands by way of 
the New Bedford packet Corona the summer after the Manta 
was given up for lost, but there was no ripple of interest in the 
Portuguese colony when a possible revival of the packet service 
was mentioned. The lost toll of the Manta weighed too heavily. 
So he got a job as captain of the box barge Katherine Howard , 
saved his money and bided his time. In October of 1939, he came 
sailing into Providence at the wheel of the little fishing schooner 
Dorothy G. Snow. He set about mooring her up the Providence 
river behind Frank Silva’s store, and let the colony know he was 
going to make a trip to Brava in a few months. 
The months passed and freight kept coming until the old 
schooner’s hold was well filled. In the meantime, somebody else’s 
war had darkened Henry Rose’s horizon. The Government was 
reluctant to give him clearance papers for traversing the war 
zone. So in desperation Rose went to Frank Silva, to help him 
find a way to get his cargo to sea. Silva arranged to have the boat 
shifted to Portuguese registry. She was renamed the Benvinda, 
and a Portuguese captain took her to sea while Henry Rose sor¬ 
rowfully sought a berth on another coal barge. The Benvinda, 
making the trip without passengers, reached Brava without 
mishap, but was lost a few months later among the islands. 
In the meantime Frank Silva and his brother John, noting the 
awakened interest in a Cape Verde packet service, bought the 
old auxiliary sloop Patsy at New London and had her towed to 
Providence for refitting, as the first boat of a proposed new line. 
The sloop, a former Class M racer, was built by Herreshoff, 
at Bristol, in 1928, and measured 82 feet over all with a beam of 
15 feet. At about the same time the brothers bought Avenger, 
another Herreshoff sloop which had been built back in 1907. 
The Silvas figured they could convert the boats to carry 20 or 25 
tons of freight and as many as a dozen passengers each, and 
counted heavily on fast passages. Refitting work was well under 
way when the United States entered the war. Several fittings 
from Vanitie, Weetamoe , Yankee and Ranger, were worked into 
the refitting of both boats, and the mast from Shimna, once 
owned by Chandler Hovey, of Boston, was to go into Patsy, 
when the Government clamped down on all such ventures. 
Future prospects are not too bright. Many there are who be¬ 
lieve the Providence to Cape Verde packets will not return to 
the Atlantic sea lanes. The Providence Portuguese colony well 
remembers the old schooners aboard which they traveled to this 
new land. They came in and out of port, visualizing, for those of 
the twentieth century who cared to see, the dangers, the hard¬ 
ships and the fatalistic courage of a hundred and even two hun¬ 
dred years before, when engines and wireless and even elemental 
comforts were unknown, and those who went to sea asked quar¬ 
ter of neither man, nor elements, but only the mercy of God. 
