An integral part of Portuguese history and culture, the cod fishing campaigns off Newfoundland in the mid-twentieth century have nevertheless remained a fairly obliterated chapter. Written by Bernardo Santareno from 1957 to 1959 while working as a doctor aboard a cod-fishing schooner, the short texts gathered in Nos mares do fim do mundo (1959) give a detailed account of the fishermen’s individual lives and collective endeavor. Aligned with the Portuguese literary tradition of the crónica, the volume contains features of travel literature, autobiography, and lyrical realism as Santareno presents an elaborate frieze of portraits, writing about his own experience as a doctor while registering the fishermen’s precarious lives. In this chapter, I take the crónica as an extension of Santareno’s ethical responsibility to care for these men, the doctor-writer tapping into the genre’s ability to capture the personal and the mundane so as to voice his capacity to recognize, absorb, and be moved by the fishermen’s marginalized stories.