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Signing on as indentured workers the family entered into a contract to work 26 days per month for 10 hours per day for 3 years to pay for their $75 passage to Terra Nova, where it was hoped that a better future could Þnally be realized. Little did they know that the situation faced by indentured workers in Hawaii’s sugar industry amounted to something slightly less than slavery. Arriving in the Sandwich Islands, the family found itself in unfamiliar surroundings, exposed to strange people and new languages, subjected to poor working conditions, coupled with abuse by the overseers of the Þeld hands and a standard of living parallel to that which they had left behind in Madeira. They now began living a regimented lifestyle of reacting to camp whistles that divided the workday into deÞned units. Once their contract was completed, they continued on for another three years to save money and once again to seek a better future elsewhere. This time they set their sights on California as the answer to the freedom and future that they had for so long sought and which had for so long evaded them.
The book concludes with a look at the descendants of the family and their lives in California from the beginning of the twentieth century to its close. Like so many other millions of Americans who had their futures paid for by their ancestors, the Pereira da Silva-de Freitas family has in the end overcome the obstacles that for far too long controlled their collective destiny.
