Barros

The first among them to use this surname was Vasco Delgado, who came to this island in the earliest days of its colonisation. He settled in the parish (freguesia) of Campanário (‘bell tower’), where he held a great deal of land by sesmaria (royal land grant to settlers on condition of cultivation), chiefly along the Ribeira dos Melões, and also kept a splendid household, according to an old nobiliary. The family bore the following coat of arms: on a field gules three bends argent, and over the field nine mullets or – one on the first in chief, three on the second, three on the third and two on the fourth; and for difference a black morlota on one of the bends; the helm argent, open and garnished or; the mantling or, gules and argent; and for crest a saltire gules charged with five mullets of the arms.

Diogo de Barros and Pedro Gonçalves de Barros, who belonged to this family, distinguished themselves in Africa, particularly in the conquest of Azemmour. Of the former, Gaspar Frutuoso says that this Diogo de Barros was so well known to the Moors, and had such a name among them as a fine horseman, that they feared him as they feared death itself. Once, he relates, Diogo was with other horsemen at the taking of some encampments (aduares) where the Moors kept their cattle safe from the Christians, surrounded by ditches, irrigation channels and pits covered over with earth. The Christians nevertheless fell upon them, and this Diogo de Barros, from his experience of such pits, realised that they were there and leapt them on his horse. Seeing that his elder brother, Pedro Gonçalves de Barros, hesitated to do the same, he turned back, being of a hot temper and a fine horseman, and forced him to leap, telling him ‘that if he did not do so he would couch his lance against him, for it was in the perils of war that horsemen were to be known; and however great those perils were, the Barros must stand out and distinguish themselves in them’. And with these words both leapt the ditches, charging the Moors with the cry of ‘Santiago’ in great fury and wreaking great havoc among them, whereupon they routed them’.