Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph C. Lincoln

Nostalgia does a lot of quiet political work in this sentence, smuggling anxiety in under the mild manner of a local lament. Lincoln’s “very unfortunately” is a genteel throat-clearing that signals more than economic regret: it frames decline as a moral story, with a clear villainy assigned not to policy, capital, or industrial change, but to demographic replacement. The “merchant marine died away” is passive voice at its most strategic. Things didn’t collapse because someone chose consolidation over coastal labor, or because maritime work was restructured; it simply “died away,” like weather. That vagueness clears space for the real point.

Then comes the pivot: “till even the majority of fishing… is in the hands of the Portuguese.” “Even” is the tell. It marks fishing as the last bastion of “our” local competence, the work assumed to belong naturally to Cape-born Yankees. The phrase “in the hands of” doesn’t just describe ownership or labor; it implies control, a transfer of agency that feels ominous. And “emigrated… some fifty years ago” undercuts any claim to newcomer status while still keeping them permanently new - long enough to be established, never enough to be fully included.

Context matters: late-19th/early-20th century New England saw real shifts - Portuguese communities (many from the Azores and Cape Verde) built lives in fishing and maritime industries as older local patterns changed. Lincoln captures a common coastal reflex: elegy for a vanished economy that quietly doubles as a boundary-making exercise. The sentence mourns a lost merchant marine, but it polices belonging.