Hey John (V & F) and everyone else The coincidences just keep piling up! I attended high school with two of Henry Miller's descendants (family hailed from Gustine), and even college with one. Their mom (married into the Miller clan) coincidentally attended Oakland's legendary University HS with my dad, so probably knew he was of Portuguese descent (even though I didn't!).
More relevantly to this forum, when I was quite little my mother told me a story about a sailor who transited the Cape and sailed up to Alaska in the 1800s -- I wasn't sure who back then, but now realize it must've been my great-grandfather Noronha, who'd regaled his grandchildren (including my dad) with tales of his seafaring adventures. Just like your family's story, the protagonist was on a "ship [that] went around the horn and up into Alaskan waters in search of whale. They apparently were caught in in the ' big freeze' of the early 1870's when many whaling ships were caught in the freezing ice." I've seen a book re Alaska whaling that recounts this freeze of 1871 -- will see if I can locate the WorldCat listing for it, so you or anyone else interested can check it out (perhaps via Inter Library Loan). While there's no way of knowing how much my great-grandfather might have embellished his stories for his grandchildren's consumption, my mother -- who never knew him, so was repeating only what she'd been told by my dad and/or his other relatives -- said that he further claimed his ship was iced in all winter with nothing but weevil-y hardtack in their stores for the men to eat. She also said he claimed to have made ship's captain at the tender age of 21 (have never found evidence of this yet, which of course proves nothing one way or the other), owing to his linguistic proficiency in 7 languages, including Russian and Chinese (curiously, however, Portuguese was never mentioned (LOL!)) -- although even in old age my dad and his sister could, between the two of them, count to 10 correctly in Chinese! -- and that at least once the man risked his life by insisting all his crew evacuate a sinking ship safely first before he'd leave. Re Cape Horn, she said that he related having had to climb a mast during a fierce storm there, and that other men fell to their deaths that way there. More later. Katharine. -- To unsubscribe from this group, send email to azores+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. Follow the confirmation directions when they arrive. For more options, such as changing to List, Digest, Abridged, or No Mail (vacation) mode, log into your Google account and visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Azores. Click in the blue area on the right that says "Join this group" and it will take you to "Edit my membership."
