Fernandes

Fernando was a king's name in Iberia before it was anybody's surname, from the Germanic Ferdinand, 'bold journey'. Portuguese made a son's name from it the way it made Rodrigues and Mendes: the ending -es, son of. Castilian did the same work with -ez, which is why Fernandes and Fernandez are one name either side of a border. The patronymic ran long before surnames were fixed and inherited.

What matters about Fernandes is not the ending but its position. A Portuguese name carries several family names after the given name, so a patronymic this common very often lands in the middle, with the distinguishing element after it. Joao Fernandes was known as the Lavrador. Pedro Fernandes signed himself de Queiros, after a word for a kind of grass that had become a place name. Joaquim Teofilo Fernandes Braga, the politician and playwright, went into the record as Teofilo Braga. The patronymic is the hinge; the third name is what the world repeated.

Joao Fernandes, the man called Lavrador, came from Terceira in the Azores and flourished between 1486 and 1501. Almost nothing survives of his early life except the customs books, which show him by 1486 running sugar and cloth between Bristol and Lisbon. Lavrador was no family name but a byname, a title or a trade, translated as landowner or as farmer. His North Atlantic voyages of the 1490s are poorly documented, much of the record reconstructed from old maps. He may have sailed northwest with a fellow Azorean, Pero de Barcelos, as far as Greenland and perhaps across the Labrador Sea; Barcelos, giving evidence in an unrelated lawsuit in 1506, said the two of them had spent three years going discovering under the king's authority.

On 28 October 1499 King Manuel I licensed him to seek out, at his own expense, islands within Portugal's sphere under the Treaty of Tordesillas. He appears next in Bristol at the end of 1500, joining two other Azoreans and three Bristol men in a syndicate that petitioned Henry VII for the right to occupy whatever they found. When the king revised the charter in 1502 he specifically excluded Fernandes from it, and after 1501 the man is gone from the record.

The name Labrador is thought to come from him, and its first home was not Canada. Sixteenth century maps put it on Greenland: the Hamy-King map marks the island Terra de Labrador. The Weimar map of 1530 carries a legend beside Greenland saying the land was discovered by the English of Bristol, and that because the man who first gave notice of it was a Labrador of the Azores, they gave it his name.

Only in the 1570s did cartographers hand Greenland its Norse name back, and the label they had to move went onto the North American mainland instead. It stayed. The Labrador peninsula and the Labrador Sea carry the working byname of an Azorean merchant whose surname was Fernandes and whose own end nobody recorded.

Pedro Fernandes de Queiros was born at Evora in 1563. Portugal and Spain came under one crown in 1580, and Queiros entered Spanish service young and became an experienced seaman and navigator. In April 1595 he sailed as chief pilot with Alvaro de Mendana y Neira to colonise the Solomon Islands. Mendana died that October; Queiros is credited with taking command of what was left and bringing the one surviving ship into the Philippines in February 1596.

Home by way of Mexico in 1598, he began petitioning Philip III for a voyage of his own to find the great southern continent. In Rome in 1600 he secured the backing of Pope Clement VIII, wrote his Treatise on Navigation as a letter to the king, and invented two navigational instruments; the Spanish ambassador there, the Duke of Sesa, set him down as a man of good judgement, hard working, quiet and disinterested. Authorisation came in March 1603, and after a shipwreck in the West Indies he reached Peru in March 1605.

On 21 December 1605 three ships left Callao with 160 men: the San Pedro y San Pablo of 150 tons, the San Pedro of 120, and the tender Los Tres Reyes. In January 1606 they raised Henderson Island and Ducie Island, then Rakahanga in the northern Cooks and the Buen Viaje Islands, Butaritari and Makin, in what is now Kiribati. In May they came to the islands later called the New Hebrides and now Vanuatu. Queiros landed on a large one, took it for a shoulder of the southern continent, and named it Australia del Espiritu Santo; the island is Espiritu Santo still. He announced a colony to be called Nova Jerusalem and founded an order of chivalry, the Knights of the Holy Ghost, to defend it. Within weeks the plan collapsed under Ni-Vanuatu hostility and quarrels among his own men.

On the night of 11 June 1606 his ship parted from the others in bad weather and could not, he later said, regain the anchorage. The crew had in fact mutinied, and Queiros was held in his cabin while the San Pedro y San Pablo sailed for Acapulco. His second in command, Luis Vaez de Torres, gave up the search and made for Manila, charting the southern coast of New Guinea on his way through the strait that now bears his name. Queiros reached Madrid in 1607 and spent seven years in poverty, sending the king more than sixty-five letters begging for another voyage. He died at Panama in 1614.

Captain Baltasar Fernandes, born at Sao Paulo about 1580 and raised at Santana do Parnaiba, belonged to a family that founded towns: his brothers Domingos and Andre founded Itu and Santana de Parnaiba. Baltasar led bandeiras into the interior after gold, silver and iron. On 15 August 1654 he and his son founded Sorocaba, with a house on the river bank and a chapel, Nossa Senhora da Ponte, that is now the city's metropolitan cathedral. In 1661 he asked the governor general, Salvador Correa de Sa e Benevides, to raise the settlement to a vila; the grant came on 3 March 1661, and a council was seated the same day with Fernandes on it as judge.

His endowment of the Benedictines in 1660, the foundation of the Mosteiro de Sao Bento, had a second purpose. The historian Anita Novinsky identified him, like many pioneers of his time, as a New Christian of Jewish descent whose conspicuous devotion masked his origin.

Rosette Mercedes Saraiva Batarda was born at Redondo in the Alentejo on 1 October 1916 and took her degree in Biological Sciences at Lisbon in 1941. At a congress that June she met the botanist Abilio Fernandes, whose name she took and under which she published for the rest of her career. They settled at Coimbra, and in November 1947 she was appointed Naturalist at the university. She reorganised the herbarium, collected across Portugal and mounted expeditions with her husband to Mozambique that greatly enlarged the holdings at Coimbra. Between 1945 and 2000 she published some 250 papers, described more than fifty taxa new to science, and is commemorated in several species, among them Marsilea batardae.

The surname went north as well as west. Charles Walker Luis Fernandes was born at Wakefield in the West Riding of Yorkshire on 3 April 1857 and played as a forward for Leeds and Yorkshire Wanderers in the years when Leeds was still a rugby union club, winning England caps in 1891 against Ireland, Wales and Scotland. He also kept a brewery, turned out at cricket for the Gentlemen of Yorkshire in 1901, and died at Thirsk in 1944 aged 87.

In Portugal the name never went anywhere. Fernandes is the tenth commonest surname in the country and the 243rd in the world, third in Angola and in Sao Tome and Principe. Vasco Fernandes, the painter known as Grao Vasco, bore it; so did Alvaro Fernandes and Duarte Fernandes, explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is on Portuguese team sheets still, and it is on the map of Canada, where nobody who says Labrador is thinking of a merchant from Terceira.