There are ships that cross the sea, and there are ships that carry a country within them. The Portuguese naval training vessel Sagres belongs to that rarer class. Wherever it sails, its white hull, towering masts, and unfurled sails do more than announce the arrival of the Portuguese Navy. They evoke centuries of departure and return, the restlessness of a people shaped by horizons, and the enduring conviction that Portugal has never ended at its own coastline. In New Bedford, a city whose streets, harbor, and family histories remain deeply marked by Portuguese and especially Azorean migration, the arrival of the Sagres became something larger than a ceremonial visit. It became a reunion between Portugal and one of the communities that has helped carry Portugal into the wider world.
José Manuel Durão Barroso, former Prime Minister of Portugal and current president of the Luso-American Development Foundation, arrived in New Bedford after spending four days and four nights aboard the Sagres during its journey from Boston. Although he had previously visited the ship for official events while it was in port, living aboard it at sea offered him an entirely different understanding of the vessel and of the men and women who serve on it. “I had the honor and privilege of spending the last four days sailing for the first time between Boston and New Bedford,” he told those gathered on Monday afternoon, describing the voyage as magnificent and unique. Even one somewhat turbulent night became part of the experience, allowing him to share the daily rhythms of the crew and to approach, from within, what he called the culture of the Portuguese Navy. The journey was therefore not simply transportation between two American ports. It was a brief immersion in a floating institution where discipline, history, service, and national identity meet beneath the Atlantic sky.
For Durão Barroso, the Sagres is unquestionably a great national symbol, but its significance reaches beyond symbolism. “It is Portuguese territory,” he said, “a small part of Portugal traveling throughout the world.” In that phrase lies the vessel’s deepest emotional power. The Sagres is not merely a representation of Portugal sent abroad; in a legal, political, and imaginative sense, it is Portugal itself moving from harbor to harbor. Its decks become a fragment of homeland beneath foreign skies, and its presence offers emigrants and descendants of emigrants a form of encounter that is both public and intimate. For those who may have spent decades away from Portugal—or who know it primarily through the stories of parents and grandparents—stepping aboard the Sagres can feel like crossing an invisible threshold back into an inherited country.
Durão Barroso connected that maritime symbolism to what he described as the nomadic character of the Portuguese people. “We do not like to remain always in the same place,” he observed. “We want to go throughout the world.” It was less a literal definition than a poetic recognition of Portugal’s historical temperament: a small country whose people have repeatedly crossed oceans, established communities on distant shores, and formed new lives without entirely surrendering the old ones. The Sagres embodies that movement. It carries the memory of navigators and sailors, but also the quieter and often more difficult journeys of emigrants who boarded steamships and airplanes in search of work, security, and opportunity. Its voyage is therefore linked not only to exploration but to diaspora—the long human passage through which Portugal became present in New Bedford, Fall River, California, Hawaii, Toronto, Bermuda, Brazil, Venezuela, South Africa, Australia, and countless other places.
The ship’s presence in the United States is especially meaningful as America approaches the 250th anniversary of its independence. Durão Barroso explained that when the Portuguese government considered how best to honor that milestone, it decided that the Sagres should be present in New York. That decision created the opportunity for the vessel to visit New Bedford as well, a city where the relationship between Portugal and the United States is not merely diplomatic or historical, but lived each day in surnames, religious traditions, music, language, food, civic institutions, and family memory. To celebrate the friendship between the two countries, he emphasized, is necessarily to celebrate the Portuguese diaspora and the Portuguese Americans who constructed that relationship at the most essential level. “Of course, it has to do with politicians and elites,” he said, “but above all, it has to do with real people.”
Those real people were present everywhere in the story of New Bedford. They arrived from the Azores, Madeira, and mainland Portugal. They worked in whaling, fishing, textile mills, agriculture, construction, commerce, education, and public service. They built churches and clubs, created newspapers and radio programs, founded businesses, raised families, and slowly transformed unfamiliar streets into communities where Portuguese identity could survive without remaining unchanged. Through their labor, sacrifice, and cultural persistence, they created a human bridge between two countries—one stronger than any agreement signed in a government office because it was built through ordinary lives.
That history came vividly into focus during Durão Barroso’s visit to the New Bedford Whaling Museum. There, amid the archives and artifacts of a city once known throughout the world as a center of the whaling industry, he encountered evidence of the Azorean crews who crossed the Atlantic and became part of New Bedford’s maritime history. “We witnessed that the crews of the whaling vessels came, in fact, from the Azores,” he recalled. For him, this was a concrete expression of the human relationship between Portugal and the United States: not an abstraction, not merely a diplomatic phrase, but the faces of people who left islands in the Atlantic and entered one of the most demanding and dangerous industries of their time.
Looking at old photographs, Durão Barroso reflected on the tendency to describe unknown historical figures as anonymous. He rejected the word. “No one is anonymous,” he said. “Everyone has a name. The problem is only that sometimes we do not know their names.” It was one of the most resonant observations of his visit. History often preserves presidents, admirals, industrialists, and political leaders while allowing the ordinary worker to disappear into collective categories: emigrant, sailor, laborer, immigrant, crewman. Yet every person in those photographs possessed a private universe—a birthplace, a mother tongue, a family left behind, fears, ambitions, sorrows, and hopes. Their names may have faded from official memory, but their lives remain embedded in the cities they helped build.
The photographs in the museum therefore became more than historical documents. They became silent witnesses to a relationship created through human courage. The faces of men from the Azores, Madeira, and mainland Portugal testified to journeys whose consequences can still be seen in New Bedford today. The city’s Portuguese identity did not emerge through ceremony. It emerged through work, endurance, adaptation, and the refusal to allow distance to erase belonging. Every photograph contained part of that larger Atlantic narrative, reminding visitors that migration is never merely the movement of populations. It is the movement of individual lives, each carrying its own history across the sea.
As president of the Luso-American Development Foundation, a position he assumed earlier this year, Durão Barroso placed the visit within a broader commitment to deepen relations between Portugal and the United States. “One of our objectives is precisely to increase and deepen the relationship between the United States and Portugal,” he declared. The Foundation’s work in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and other parts of the country already supports initiatives in culture, the arts, science, technology, and academia. These investments, he argued, give practical meaning to friendship. They transform speeches about bilateral relations into scholarships, research partnerships, cultural programs, educational exchanges, artistic collaborations, and opportunities through which people and institutions can work together.
That distinction between symbolic friendship and practical cooperation is essential. Nations often speak warmly of historic alliances, shared democratic values, and enduring ties, but those relationships remain most vital when they create opportunities in the present. Supporting scientific research, university partnerships, cultural production, and artistic exchange allows the relationship between Portugal and the United States to move beyond commemoration and toward shared construction. It ensures that the Atlantic connection is not preserved only in museums or family albums, but renewed in laboratories, classrooms, concert halls, community organizations, and emerging technologies.
New Bedford is a particularly meaningful place for that work. The city stands as one of the clearest examples of how Portuguese migration became part of American history while continuing to enrich Portugal’s relationship with the world. Its Portuguese-American community is not a marginal footnote in the story of either country. It is one of the principal human foundations upon which the bilateral relationship rests. The descendants of emigrants have become educators, entrepreneurs, artists, elected officials, researchers, workers, and community leaders, carrying their heritage into every dimension of American life.
For Durão Barroso, commemorating the 250th anniversary of the United States therefore means recognizing not only the American nation but the immigrant communities that helped shape it. Portuguese Americans are part of that history. Their story is one of integration without complete erasure, of loyalty to a new homeland without indifference toward ancestral origins. They have contributed to America while continuing to sustain ties with Portugal, creating identities that do not require a choice between the two.
The arrival of the Sagres made that dual belonging visible. A Portuguese vessel entered an American harbor whose history had been shaped by Portuguese sailors and immigrants. The ship brought with it the flag, language, and maritime traditions of Portugal, but it entered waters already filled with Portuguese memory. For a moment, sea and city seemed to recognize one another. The Sagres was not arriving in a foreign place so much as visiting one of the many distant shores where Portugal had already taken root.
That is perhaps why Durão Barroso’s journey from Boston to New Bedford carried such emotional force. Four days at sea offered more than a privileged experience aboard a celebrated vessel. They traced, in reverse and in symbolic form, the Atlantic routes followed by generations of Portuguese migrants. Those earlier travelers did not arrive aboard a national symbol. Many came under harsh conditions, with little certainty and fewer resources. Yet they carried within them another kind of Portugal—a Portugal made of memory, language, faith, recipes, music, and longing. They transformed that inner inheritance into communities that remain alive today.
The Sagres, with its majestic sails and unmistakable presence, represents the nation in visible form. The diaspora represents it in human form. One travels from port to port; the other has traveled across generations. Together, they tell the fuller story of Portugal: a country geographically small but historically and emotionally dispersed throughout the world.
As America lives its 250th anniversary, the visit reminds both countries that their friendship was not built solely through governments, treaties, or strategic interests. It was built by people whose names were sometimes lost but whose labor remains visible; by sailors who crossed difficult seas; by families who rebuilt their lives in unfamiliar cities; and by descendants who continue to inhabit the space between memory and belonging.
The Sagres eventually leaves every harbor. Its sails disappear beyond the horizon, and the small piece of Portuguese territory it carries moves toward another shore. But in New Bedford, Portugal does not depart with the ship. It remains in the museum photographs, in the names written above storefronts, in the Portuguese heard in homes and community halls, in the churches and festivals, and in the descendants of those who once crossed the Atlantic seeking a future.
That is the deeper meaning of Durão Barroso’s visit and of the work he now undertakes through FLAD. The relationship between Portugal and the United States does not need to be invented. It already exists, profound and human, built over centuries. The task now is to deepen it, renew it, and ensure that the bridge created by previous generations remains strong enough for those still to come.
Diniz Borges, from a story in Diário dos Açores and Portuguese Times. Photos from PT and Marinha Portuguesa.