Ferreira Pestana (Daniel)

He was born in Funchal on 13 October 1824 and died in the city of Nova Goa in November 1906, the son of Manuel Ferreira Pestana and Dona Vicência Rosa de Jesus Guedes Pestana. His first wife was the mother of the Count of Nova Goa, and his second the Countess of Torres Novas. In 1845 he accompanied his uncle, Councillor (conselheiro, honorary title of the royal council) José Ferreira Pestana (see that entry), to India as his aide-de-camp, and he spent a considerable part of his life there. He followed a military career: he was commissioned second lieutenant (alferes) in 1844 and died with the rank of general. In Portuguese India, where he was held in the highest regard and where his qualities of character and intelligence were much appreciated, he carried out various important public-service assignments. In the Kingdom (reino, i.e. mainland Portugal) he also held some distinguished posts, such as that of aide-de-camp to Marshal Saldanha, whose well-known martial bearing he is said to have imitated. He contributed to several newspapers and published in India a grammar textbook, which is listed in the Diccionario Bibliographico Portuguez under the title Principios de grammatica geral applicada á lingua portuguesa, publicados e offerecidos á mocidade de Nova Goa, Nova Goa, 1848, XII-196 pp. Not long ago an educated person who had lived for some years in Portuguese India informed us that this work was a slavish imitation of the work of Francisco de Andrade, published in Funchal in 1844, but we have not had the opportunity to verify this.

Pestana was one of the most illustrious Madeirans of the 19th century. He distinguished himself remarkably as a soldier, as a teacher and man of science, as a politician and statesman, and no less as a man of the most austere integrity, bequeathing to his descendants a prestigious name that fully commanded the regard of all his compatriots. His biography is long, and we shall try to condense it into a few lines so as not to give this article excessive breadth.

He was the son of Manuel Ferreira Pestana, captain-major (capitão-mor, commander of the local militia) of Ribeira Brava (‘wild river’), and of his wife Dona Ana Teresa Sousa Pestana, and was born there on 26 March 1795. After completing his preparatory studies in Funchal and enlisting in the artillery battalion of that city, he left for Coimbra in 1815 to enrol in the faculties of philosophy and mathematics of the University. Ferreira Pestana’s academic life was an unbroken series of triumphs, which earned him a proposal from the university congregation concerned to receive the degrees of licentiate and doctor free of charge; he received the doctoral hood (capelo) in the faculty of mathematics on 3 July 1820. Returning to his native island, where he spent some time teaching a chair of mathematics, he later settled in Coimbra to serve as assistant at the astronomical observatory and to prepare for the competitive examination for a university teaching post. The civil conflicts forced him to leave Coimbra, and it was only in 1834, by decree of 14 July of that year, that he was appointed professor in the faculty of mathematics.

As soon as the movement of reaction against the Miguelite (supporter of the absolutist King Miguel) government took shape, Dr Ferreira Pestana, as a lieutenant of the academic corps, joined it. He thereby exposed himself to persecution by the followers of absolutism, and was arrested and taken to the prisons of the city of Porto, where he remained for a long time. Caught in the net of the special judicial commission (alçada) that the Count of Basto sent there, he was sentenced on 9 April 1829 to perpetual penal exile (degredo), with the death penalty should he ever attempt to return to Portugal. By the same sentence ten of Ferreira Pestana’s fellow prisoners were condemned to death, and by order of the judges of the commission he was also made to witness the execution of the unfortunate condemned men in the Praça Nova. The sentence was carried out on 9 May 1829. Dressed in the white robe of the condemned and with the rope around his neck, Ferreira Pestana walked three times around the gallows and witnessed the death of the ten wretched men, victims of the tyranny of Miguel I. A witness of the time relates that Dr Ferreira Pestana, not wishing to watch the horrible spectacle of the execution, lowered his head and closed his eyes, but one of the executioner’s assistants struck him a violent blow across the face and forced him to look at the scaffold.

Ferreira Pestana was not executed in the Praça Nova, as his fellow countryman and friend Dr José Martiniano da Fonseca and the other condemned men were, because the boundless devotion of his wife, Dona Maria Lecor, carried to the point of heroism, succeeded in freeing him from the bloodthirsty hands of the executioners. She went to Lisbon to implore the clemency of the king and his ministers on her husband’s behalf. She could not obtain an audience with Miguel I, but she managed to have the Infanta Dona Maria da Assunção receive her kindly and yield to her pleas and her tears. Through the Infanta’s intervention, Dona Maria Lecor was able to approach various authorities and obtain from them several letters of recommendation to the judges of the commission. Some received her kindly, but others were filled with indignation, telling her that her husband was a great malhado (derogatory nickname for a liberal under the Miguelist regime), deserving of the severest punishment. Her tears and heroic devotion were not in vain, however, for the sentence spared Dr Ferreira Pestana from climbing the steps of the gallows. His devoted wife accompanied her husband as he walked around the scaffold, and afterwards followed him into exile.

After the execution of his companions, Ferreira Pestana was returned to the prisons of Porto, and shortly afterwards was sent to Lisbon, where he was committed to the notorious dungeons of São Julião da Barra. He remained there for some time, suffering the horrors that the notorious Teles Jordão inflicted on the prisoners of those cells. In 1829 he left Lisbon for Luanda to serve the sentence of penal exile imposed on him by the Porto commission. In Angola, Ferreira Pestana and other political deportees managed to charter a ship secretly, which, despite the risk of the undertaking, succeeded in carrying them to the city of Rio de Janeiro. In the capital of Brazil, to earn his living, he founded a school, of which he was director and which gained great renown there.

When constitutional government was restored, Ferreira Pestana returned home and resumed his place in the army. He also began teaching his chair in the Faculty of Mathematics, to which he had been appointed by decree of 14 July 1834. He seems not to have been very assiduous as a professor, because active political life and the various posts he held did not allow him to stay long in Coimbra. In 1834, while still in Rio de Janeiro, he was elected deputy for Estremadura. He represented Madeira in the legislative sessions of 1836, 1837–1838, 1838–1840, 1840–1842 and 1851–1852, and was also deputy for Coimbra. At a time when only men of recognised merit held the office of civil governor, Ferreira Pestana headed the districts of Vila Real, Leiria and Coimbra. In 1841 he was called to the councils of the Crown, serving as Minister of the Navy from July of that year to February of the following year. He returned to the ministry in 1851, holding the portfolio of the Kingdom. From then on he always refused to join the government, despite the many appeals made to him on various occasions. By royal letter (carta régia) of 30 December 1862 he was appointed a peer of the realm.

Ferreira Pestana’s administration of the districts in which he served as civil governor was brief and passed unnoticed. The same was not true in India, where he was governor-general of that state at a time when the traditions of the viceroys, and the honours and privileges they had enjoyed, were still very much alive. Although the office had already been abolished, Ferreira Pestana was widely known, and particularly on this island, as the Viceroy of India. He twice held that office, then so exalted, and showed not only the qualities of a true statesman but also his eminent gifts of character, above all the impartiality and justice with which he shaped every act of his administration. It is impossible here to go into details and recount facts that would take us very far. We cannot, however, resist mentioning an event that occurred during his second government of India, which won great renown at the time and whose echoes resounded with great admiration in Europe. Near Goa, but in British territory, the fondus rose in insurrection against English rule. The revolt was crushed after a hard-fought struggle lasting many months, in which the British troops suffered serious reverses. A considerable number of rebels and their families took refuge in Portuguese territory, laying down their arms and asking for the protection of our flag. The protests and demands of the Governor of Bombay and the Governor-General in Calcutta for the surrender of the insurgents were forceful and full of threats. Ferreira Pestana, however, invoking the law of nations and moved by the most just and elementary feelings of humanity, flatly refused to hand them over. The negotiations lasted some months. In the end, the dispatch of British troops to the Portuguese frontier, and an English warship anchored at Goa with its gunports open and its guns trained on the governor’s palace, made it plain that the matter was to be settled by force and that Portugal would once again suffer humiliation and affront at the hands of her faithful ally. Meanwhile Colonel Ontiani appeared in Goa and, in the name of the Governor-General of British India, demanded the immediate surrender of the refugees. Ferreira Pestana simply replied that he would not hand over the insurgents who had sheltered under the Portuguese flag, and that if they were seized and taken by force to English territory, the governor and representative of Portugal would go among them. In this way he highlighted, and set in sharp relief, the violence that the government of British India intended to commit. This firmness and pride, which neither threats nor dangers could bend, daunted the English, and the matter was later settled amicably between the governments of the two home countries.

Councillor José Ferreira Pestana, who had retired in 1875 with the rank of general, died in Lisbon on 12 June 1885, at the full age of 90.

For the biography of this illustrious Madeiran, the pamphlets José Ferreira Pestana, apontamentos biográficos, by V. Esteves, Nova Goa, 1855, and Duas palavras sobre a India Portuguesa em relação ao Sr. conselheiro José Ferreira Pestana, ao Sr. conselheiro José Joaquim Lopes Lima e a Custódio M. Gomes, Lisbon, 1848, may be consulted.