Hernández

Hernández and Fernández are not cousins. They are one surname written twice, both meaning son of Hernán, Hernando or Fernando, the Spanish form of the Germanic Ferdinand, and both documented in Castile from the fifteenth century. No other language of the peninsula produced the H: Portuguese and Galician kept Fernandes, Catalan kept Ferran and Ferrandis, Basque Fernanditz.

The freeze caught both forms, and neither finished off the other. The sculptor Gregorio Hernández (1576-1636) is filed in the record more often as Fernández: one man, two first letters, no saying which is the error. Where Castilian never ran, the H never arrived: Brazil has over 1.8 million bearers of Fernandes and 31,617 of Hernandes and Hernandez together.

Francisco Hernández de Toledo was born at La Puebla de Montalbán in the province of Toledo around 1515, and nothing whatever is known of his parents. His surname at the start was Fernando. In 1570 he altered it to Hernando, then altered it again to Hernández, the form he kept until his death on 28 January 1587. The shift that turned the sons of Fernando into a nation of Hernándezes is dated and documented inside one man's own signature.

He entered medicine at Alcalá in 1530 and graduated bachelor in 1536. He practised in Seville, where he married Juana Díaz. From 1556 to 1560 he was physician at the Hospital y Monasterio de Guadalupe in Extremadura, managing its botanical garden and dissecting with Francisco Miró. He moved to Toledo in 1560 and rode often to the court at Madrid, where he came to know the anatomist Andreas Vesalius. In 1567 Philip II made him his personal physician.

In 1570 Hernández was ordered onto the first scientific mission sent to the New World, a survey of the region's medicinal plants and animals. He travelled seven years with his son Juan, collected an estimated 3,000 species and interviewed indigenous people through translators; three indigenous painters, Antón, Baltazar Elías and Pedro Vázquez, made his illustrations.

European botanical vocabulary could not hold what he was finding, so he dropped the ranks of tree, shrub and herb and classified by native names, mostly Nahuatl. He described vanilla, in the first written account of it, maize in long chapters, four varieties of cacao, tobacco, chilis, and cacti across fourteen chapters. In the epidemic of 1576 that Nahuatl speakers called cocoliztli, pest, he performed autopsies at the Hospital Real de San José de los Naturales and set down the symptoms with clinical accuracy.

The work ran to 22 books in Latin. Hernández sent the king sixteen volumes bound in blue leather and worked in gold and silver, and on Philip II's repeated command made a second, revised copy: 893 pages of text with 2,071 pages of paintings, so that American plants could be seen in Europe. That was the version held at the Escorial, and that was the version lost in the library fire of 17 July 1671.

What reached print reached it through other hands: the Index medicamentorum, appended to Juan Barrios's medical treatise in 1607, and Federico Cesi's Latin compendium at Rome in 1628. The name outlasted the paper. Plumier dedicated the plant genus Hernandia to him in 1703, Linnaeus accepted it in 1753, and the family Hernandiaceae stands on it.

Alonso Hernández del Portillo (1543-1624) was born in Gibraltar while it was Spanish, sat on the city council and held the office of jurado, answerable for the town's food supply. Between 1605 and 1610 he wrote the Historia de la Muy Noble y Más Leal Ciudad de Gibraltar, the first written history of the place, and worked over it again between 1615 and 1622.

He opened with the Libyan and Greek Heracles and passed over the Moorish centuries almost entirely. The value is in the century he watched himself: the people, port, trade and fishing of sixteenth-century Gibraltar. His manuscript, kept at Algeciras, became a source for Ignacio López de Ayala's History of Gibraltar of 1792.

The name went out with the empire in quantity. Two Spanish conquistadors are recorded as Francisco Hernández de Córdoba: one, dead in 1517, explored Yucatán; the other, dead by 1526, founded Nicaragua. Even with a city fixed to the end of it the patronymic could not tell two men apart.

As of 2014, 52.9 per cent of known bearers lived in Mexico, one person in twenty-five, where it is the commonest surname of all and runs heaviest in Hidalgo at one in ten. Spain holds 4.0 per cent, thickest in the Canary Islands at one in twenty-four, then Murcia, Castile and León, and Extremadura: the islands and the western provinces that emptied across the Atlantic, not the heartland where the spelling was made.

José Rafael Hernández was born on 10 November 1834 at the Chacra Pueyrredón, now Villa Ballester Oeste in the partido of General San Martín. His parents were Rafael Hernández and Isabel de Pueyrredón, first cousin of Juan Martín de Pueyrredón, and the two halves of the family stood on opposite sides of Argentina's quarrel: the Pueyrredóns were unitarians, the Hernándezes federals, and an uncle died at Caseros fighting for Rosas.

His mother died in 1843, and a complaint of the chest that doctors said needed a change of air took him out of school in 1846 and onto the pampas with his father, mayordomo of Rosas's estancias. He learned to ride and to do every task the gauchos did, and got there the knowledge of country life his whole life's work ran on. He fought at Cepeda and Pavón under Urquiza, and his own paper El Argentino, founded at Paraná in 1863, carried the editorials on the killing of the caudillo Ángel Vicente Peñaloza that became Vida del Chacho.

Hernández joined Ricardo López Jordán's rising, the last of the federal rebellions, and it was beaten at Ñaembé on 26 January 1871; he went into exile at Santana do Livramento in Brazil. Proscribed by Sarmiento and hiding in the Gran Hotel Argentino in Buenos Aires, he wrote the seven and a half cantos of El Gaucho Martín Fierro on the coarse paper of a pulpería notebook. La República began serialising it on 28 November 1872 and the press of La Pampa put it out as a book that December.

It sold into the countryside at once, read aloud at campfires and in country stores, because the paisanos recognised themselves in the misfortunes of the man in it. La vuelta de Martín Fierro followed in 1879, and the two together are reckoned the summit of Argentine literature. He came home under an amnesty, sat as senator of Buenos Aires, and in 1880 defended the federalisation of the city against Leandro N. Alem in a celebrated debate. Argentina keeps his birthday, 10 November, as the Día de la Tradición.

Juan Hernández Saravia (1880-1962) followed a family tradition into the artillery school in 1897. He ran Azaña's military staff and was made minister of war in August 1936. In 1937 he took command of the Army of the Levante, led the Republican side at the battle of Teruel and was promoted general that December; with Catalonia cut off in 1938 he commanded the Eastern Region Army Group through the Francoist campaign there. He died in exile in Mexico.

José Gregorio Hernández Cisneros (1864-1919) was born at Isnotú in the Venezuelan state of Trujillo, his mother's family descended from the kin of the fifteenth-century Cardinal Cisneros. He came down from the Andes to Caracas in 1878, qualified in medicine at the Central University of Venezuela in 1888 and was sent to Paris on a government grant to study bacteriology and pathology. He treated the poor for nothing and bought their medicines with his own money, and was still treating influenza cases in Caracas in 1918 when a motorist knocked him down and killed him the following year. He was beatified on 30 April 2021 and canonised by Leo XIV on 19 October 2025, among the first saints Venezuela has had.