Perestrelo (Bartolomeu)

He is the well-known first donatary and settler of the island of Porto Santo (‘holy harbour’). Some authors have made the serious mistake of regarding Bartolomeu Perestrelo as a navigator and even as the discoverer of that island. They were perhaps led to this by the fact that he was its first captain-donatary (capitão-donatário), an office that was sometimes linked to the fact of discovery.

He was a fidalgo (nobleman of the lesser nobility) of the household of Prince João, brother of Henry the Navigator, when Prince Henry invested him with the donatary captaincy (donataria) of Porto Santo and entrusted him with the settlement and colonisation of the island.

The charter by which Henry the Navigator granted the island of Porto Santo is dated 1 November 1446, that is, roughly twenty years after the colonisation of the archipelago began. We must suppose that Perestrelo had already settled on Porto Santo with all the privileges and prerogatives granted to the donataries, and that the charter was merely the loyal and formal confirmation of those privileges. We must believe the same of the other two captaincies of Madeira. In the letter of grant (carta de doação), Prince Henry says: ‘I give charge of my island of Porto Santo to Bartolomeu Perestrelo, fidalgo of my household, so that the said Bartolomeu Perestrelo may maintain it for me in justice and right; and should he die, it pleases me that his first son, or another if such there be, shall hold this charge in the manner aforesaid, and so from descendant to descendant in the direct line... shall have... jurisdiction... in civil and criminal matters, save for death or the cutting off of a limb...’. The charter mentions various rights, prerogatives and exemptions granted to the first donatary, including the collection of various dues and taxes. The captaincy of Porto Santo remained in the possession and under the authority of Bartolomeu Perestrelo’s descendants until the period of Philippine rule. With the appointment of governors-general, that rule reduced the donataries of the archipelago to a very subordinate and almost purely honorary position, although they continued to collect substantial revenues under the original privileges granted to them. When Portugal fell under the Castilian yoke, Diogo Perestrelo Bisforte was the 6th captain-donatary of the island of Porto Santo.

The captaincy of Porto Santo never reached a high degree of prosperity. The smallness of the island, the neglect it suffered from the mother country from the earliest days of colonisation, the frequent pirate raids, the poor administration of some donataries and governors, the conceited pride of many of its inhabitants, who scorned work because they descended from old fidalgos, and the indolence of its people, brought about by the climate and by other causes as well: all of this contributed markedly to the meagre development of this donatary captaincy.

In his short work A Mulher de Colombo, the writer António Maria de Freitas (Nicolau Florentino) deals at some length with the first captain-donatary of Porto Santo. We shall transcribe a few passages from this work, which we consider extremely interesting.

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The disappointment that the young Bartolomeu suffered on visiting his future domains was the same that befell many others, both in the islands and on the mainland. They measured the scale of royal generosity only by the much-vaunted extent of the territory, by fanciful reports of its fertility and by the grand name of the lordship. They learned the true worth of what they had petitioned for only when the obligations they had undertaken, amounting to a sum far greater than the local income, forced them either to let the land out in parcels for trifling rents or to leave it to lie abandoned, of which abundant traces could still be found until recently in many parts of the country.

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Carried away by the much-proclaimed virtues of the newly discovered island, Bartolomeu did not know what he was asking for. In this he perhaps differed from Zarco and Tristão, whose second voyage is more reasonably explained by their intention, after landing the settlers on Porto Santo, to continue the enterprise they had begun, or at least to sound and explore those waters of the Atlantic, than by any wish to bury themselves on an island whose area and geological conditions, even if appraised only at a glance, ought not to have tempted them...

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Bartolomeu soon realised that his imagination had betrayed him and that he had given too free a rein to his credulity. The comparison between Porto Santo and the new island found by Zarco and Tristão – incomparably superior to the first in its attractive appearance and in the promising vigour of its vegetation – completed his discouragement.

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He therefore returned to the Kingdom (reino, i.e. mainland Portugal), most probably after Madeira had been found. The cause of this withdrawal, and at the same time of the departure of his two companions for the second island, is attributed to a destructive plague of rabbits which multiplied on the island after a doe rabbit with young, born during the voyage, had been set loose there. The following year – if indeed a year passed between Bartolomeu’s departure and his return – “they had already killed a very great many, yet without making any dent” in the damage, which disheartened the settlers by ruining their agricultural labours.

This extraordinary power of procreation, before which zoology bows, powerless to explain it, causes no great astonishment to us, who are laymen in science. Our forefathers had a guileless readiness to believe without seeing or questioning, which, from the standpoint of spiritual hygiene, is simply enviable in these troubled times of malice and suspicion...

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Porto Santo, with its neighbour Madeira beginning to prosper visibly, became more attractive and less isolated, finding close at hand many resources that its own unkind local conditions could not at first provide. Yet even with the passing of time – despite the transformations and improvements that Bartolomeu’s domains underwent thanks to relentless toil, which brought him down very early, and to financial sacrifices that were little more than futile – the island never distinguished itself by any course of economic and ethnographic autonomy that would prove sufficient material and moral progress; still less in the first years of its colonisation...

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One of the documents on which we are working shows that Dona Margarida Martins, Perestrelo’s wife, did not live much beyond 1431. The last trace of this lady’s life in our possession is a letter from John I, dated 8 June of that year, granting her and her husband some houses subject to a quit-rent (foro) in the Rua Nova, next to the Porta da Erva.

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No children were born of this marriage, as far as we know, and Bartolomeu married a second time, to Dona Brites Furtado de Mendonça, of the well-known family of that name, which also holds a distinguished place in the history of the archipelago.

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Three daughters of the second marriage are known, all married to important men. The first, Dona Catarina Furtado de Mendonça, was the wife of Mem Rodrigues de Vasconcelos, commander of Seixo (‘pebble’); the second, Dona Filipa de Mendonça Furtado, married João Teixeira, third son of Tristão Vaz Teixeira, first captain-donatary of the jurisdiction of Machico; the third, Dona Izeu Perestrelo, joined her fate to that of Pedro Correia da Cunha, captain-donatary of the island of Graciosa. ‘Widowed a second time, Bartolomeu Perestrelo, who was still a relatively young man, married for the third time, taking as his wife Dona Isabel Moniz, daughter of Vasco Martins Moniz, who at that time lived in Machico with all his great household, as was seen when we dealt with the Moniz family.

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This new alliance, the most distinguished and the one most directly bound up with our historical purpose, reveals in a certain way Bartolomeu’s moral standing and the confidence inspired by the seriousness of his dealings and his love of work. Only those who know closely, from the old papers, the proud nobility of the Moniz family, whose alliances were sought by the best houses of Madeira and the mainland, can judge the firm conviction with which we set down this biographical note. . .

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To ennoble Bartolomeu Perestrelo, it was invented that he came from Spain to Portugal in 1428 with the wife of Dom Duarte, and immediately afterwards that he was the companion of Zargo and Tristão in the discovery of Porto Santo in 1418 (!), when the most reliable evidence of his nobility is the proof of lineage made by his father Filippone Palestrello in 1399. To glorify him as a seaman, people have even gone so far as to imagine manuscripts he left and advice he gave to his son-in-law Christopher Columbus, although it has been proved that he never knew the man whom his little daughter Filipa, left fatherless at the age of 5, was to marry...

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The donatary of Porto Santo is not entitled to bear the palm for having discovered his island; but on his head rightly rests the halo of a martyr to work, one of the most valuable social consecrations of all time.

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Death came to take him at his post around 1457, when he was little more than 50 years old. He left his family in precarious financial circumstances, for his captaincy had consumed everything he had, from his wives’ dowries and the benefits he obtained by various means to his very health, without all that capital buried there yielding a tolerable income to support his widow and his two children, Bartolomeu and Filipa, left fatherless at a very tender age.

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Bartolomeu Perestrelo died in the town (vila) of Baleira, on the island of Porto Santo, and from the most reliable evidence it appears that he was buried in the parish church of Our Lady of Pity (Nossa Senhora da Piedade).

For a fuller picture, the reader should consult what is said in vol. 1 of this work, p. 117 ff., about the town of Vila Baleira and the municipality of Porto Santo.